2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering graduates are increasingly expected to address sustainability challenges that require capabilities beyond technical problem solving alone. In response, sustainability competency frameworks emphasize capacities such as systems thinking, collaboration, anticipatory reasoning, and ethical judgment (Wiek et al., 2011; UNESCO, 2017). While these competencies are widely articulated across policy, disciplinary, and accreditation contexts, less clarity exists regarding how they are structurally supported through common pedagogical practices in undergraduate engineering education.

This paper examines sustainability competencies through a pedagogy-centered analytic lens. Sustainability competencies were normalized across three influential frameworks: UNESCO Education for Sustainable Development competencies (UNESCO, 2017), the Engineering for One Planet framework (Bernardon et al., 2024), and ABET student outcomes (ABET, 2023). This normalized competency structure was used to examine alignment with pedagogical practices identified through a document-based institutional landscape survey of undergraduate engineering programs.

Publicly available program and course materials were analyzed using descriptive coding to identify recurring pedagogical features, including design experiences, project-based learning, teamwork, communication, community engagement, and reflection. Alignment was treated as evidence of pedagogical visibility rather than of enacted instruction or student learning outcomes (Lozano et al., 2017).

Findings indicate that sustainability competencies aligned with dominant engineering pedagogies, such as systems thinking, collaboration, and communication, are consistently supported across programs. In contrast, competencies related to anticipatory thinking, normative reasoning, and self-awareness appear weakly or inconsistently embedded, despite their prominence in sustainability frameworks (Rieckmann, 2012; Brundiers et al., 2021). These patterns suggest that uneven sustainability competency development reflects pedagogical compatibility rather than lack of institutional intent. The paper contributes an analytic approach for examining how sustainability competencies are structurally supported within engineering curricula.