Toolkit for the Interdisciplinary Infusion of the SDGs into Classrooms

Engineering

The following resources will provide instructors with materials to support, introduce and infuse the SDGs into their Engineering lessons.

  • Granta has an Education Hub with over 350 lesson plans, case studies, exercises and lecture units for the SDGs in engineering and sustainable development. 

  • Visit the Wakelet SDG page for lesson plans, links, videos, student challenges, activities, infographics and tasks for all of the 17 SDGs.

  • Read the 5 case studies below of women in engineering. The case studies are from the Royal Academy of Engineering. Instructors can use the case studies to promote diversity and inclusion in engineering. See the following:

Case Study #1 about Yewande Akinola

Case Study #2 about Sophie Harker

Case Study #3 about Pavlina Akrtias

Case Study #4 about Jo Smith

Case Study #5 about Dr. Enass Abo-Hamed

  • Please read more about women in engineering at RAE.

The Sustainable Development Goals Fund has an online database of sustainable development case studies, along with a selection of effective practices on how to achieve a sustainable world and advance the 17 SDGs.

  • 30 Self Nudges for the SDGs is an SDG i-Level Project that launched the Self-Nudging Online Toolkit for University Staff on SDGs. Self-Nudges help remind university teachers and staff of the relevance of their work to the SDGs, prompting them to think about sustainable development, apply this mental framework to their work and as a result create more contributions to SDGs while feeling better about what they do. A continuous and reinforced engagement with the SDGs will create a mindset conducive to forging new individual contributions to sustainable development and the SDGs.
  • Visit the Data Hub of The Government of Canada, the focal point for reporting Canada’s data for the SDG indicators. They partner with many councils and organizations and include all 17 goals. Some examples featured include Gender, Diversity and Inclusion statistics, Human Activity and the Environment.
  • View Engineers Canada’s report on national guidelines for sustainable development and environmental stewardship. The report describes engineering practices that are anticipatory of sustainable development and preventative in degrading the environment. 
  • Visit Faculty for a Future and search the Seed Library It is a searchable database of open-access educational resources that can support educators and students by integrating sustainability into discipline-specific teaching and learning. Search by issue, discipline, resource type and characteristic.
  • FairTrade Canada advocates for thriving farmer and worker communities that have more control over their futures. They stand in solidarity with producer organizations, without compromise, to their standards, prices, or vision to make trade work for everyone along the supply chain. Their impact is economic, social and environmental. 
  • Visit GapMinder to learn about Dollar Street. Imagine the world as a street ordered by income. The poorest live to the left and the richest to the right and everybody else lives somewhere in between. GapMinder is an independent Swedish foundation with no political, religious or economic affiliations. They fight devastating misconceptions about global development with a fact-based worldview everyone can understand. They produce free teaching resources based on reliable statistics and collaborate with universities, UN-based organizations, public agencies and non-governmental organizations.
  • Find Geospatial data and timely data sets for countries around the world by SDG.

  • The Global Footprint Network supports the shift towards a sustainable economy by advancing the Ecological Footprint, a measurement and management tool that makes the reality of global limits central to decision-making.  Ecological footprint projects can be an effective way to get students to think about how sustainability intersects with their lives.
  • Visit If It Were My Home an interactive map that helps people understand life outside of their home country. Use the country comparison tool to compare living conditions in a home country to those in another.
  • The POPGRID Data Collaborative aims to bring together and expand the international community of data providers, users, and sponsors concerned with georeferenced data on population, human settlements and infrastructure. They seek to improve data access, timeliness, consistency, and utility; support data use and interpretation; identify and address pressing user needs; reduce duplication and user confusion; and encourage innovation and cross-disciplinary use. They bring expertise and perspectives from diverse natural, social, health, and engineering science disciplines and sectors, and from government, academia, private industry, and nongovernmental organizations. 
  • TeachSDGs helps instructors to connect to the SDGs through resources such as videos, global projects, social media and teacher connections. 
  • The Sustainability Curriculum Consortium represents an opportunity to fill a gap in the sustainability movement in higher education. They envision a consortium that builds our collective capacity as educators and change agents, along with the administrators and stakeholders who can support them, to improve the ways sustainability is perceived, modeled, and taught; that serves as a generator of principles, practices, and shared resources, to move the education component of higher education sustainability up to and beyond campus operations. 
  • Read the Engineering a Better World  report from the Royal Academy of Engineering, which describes how engineering can work to achieve each of the 17 goals.