Curriculum Development for Socially Responsible and Sustainably Acting Engineers

It is the self-proclaimed ideal of university education to provide students with knowledge and skills to act responsibly and sustainably. There seems to be a university-wide consensus that ethics, sustainability, digitization, diversity, and scientific practice should be added to the subject-specific syllabi. What might be construed as a contradiction between industry demands and societal norms is in fact a response to the corporate needs of industry and business. They too require engineers to be trained to think systemically and react adequately to changing societal conditions. This also includes the on-going challenge of diversity and gender equality in industry and business, and in particular the well-established demand to attract more women to pursue a career in engineering. Based on recent experiences in the curriculum development process at the Technische Universität Berlin, the article discusses, based on first qualitative insights, how the development of the curricula can work in the given context.