{"id":5,"date":"2025-10-07T16:06:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-07T16:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eee4sd.web.ua.pt\/?page_id=2"},"modified":"2026-01-27T11:34:50","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T11:34:50","slug":"pagina-exemplo","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/eee4sd.web.ua.pt\/?page_id=5","title":{"rendered":"About the project"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Climate change is pressuring countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. To tackle this issue, the European Green Deal aims to transition Europe to a carbon-neutral economy. This ambitious political and social goal impacts all sectors of society, including higher education in terms of how it prepares the next generation for the emerging green job market. One of the main challenges is the demand for qualified engineers. As a response, there has been an increased emphasis on including sustainability in higher education curricula. To support learning on sustainability, the European Union published the GreenComp \u2013 a framework with a set of sustainability competences that defines empathy as a critical attitude when collaborating with others to frame current and potential sustainability challenges.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, engineering employers look for more than just academic and technical performance; they value interpersonal skills and real-world project experience. According to the World Economic Forum, today\u2019s jobs require many skills that are developed through socio-emotional learning. These skills include \u2018character qualities\u2019 and ethical orientation such as leadership, social and cultural awareness, both requiring empathy. Moreover, the competences required for the 21st century go beyond technical knowledge. They span across different disciplines and bring to the fore the ability to collaborate with multiple stakeholders, consider different perspectives, and understand people with diverse backgrounds and experiences. In this sense, empathy plays a fundamental role in enabling the development of more humanistic and socially constructed competences for sustainable<\/em> development.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In engineering education, the focus on sustainability has led to a body of initiatives designed to tackle global challenges. However, most of the engineering programs focus exclusively on technical solutions and tend to overlook the interpersonal and social dimensions of sustainability. Alarmingly, research has found that engineering students\u2019 interest in public welfare declines throughout their engineering programmes, and that<\/em> students are less \u00b4person-oriented\u2019 than engineering practitioners. These findings call for the need to support engineering students develop and effectively use empathy. Empathy \u2013 the ability to understand a person from his or her frame of reference rather than one\u2019s own, their feelings, perceptions, and thoughts \u2013 is an essential element of human-centred design and ethical behaviour, as well as of effective work in teams,<\/em> engagement with diverse stakeholders, and ability to work in intercultural settings. Empathy is the first phase of the design thinking process, essential to comprehending the situations of other people and generates more future-oriented, human-centred solutions. It promotes caring and ethical thinking. All of these aspects are critical to engineering education and practice.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the context of sustainable design, engineering students must not only relate to the needs of the primary user but also empathize with those indirectly affected by their decisions. Sustainability problems are multidimensional and require consideration of multiple perspectives. Therefore, developing engineering students\u2019 knowledge and competences for sustainability requires problem-oriented, collaborative, student-centred, contextual learning environments like Problem-Based Learning (PBL) or Challenged Based Learning (CBL).<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Empathy is the foundational \u2018people skill\u2019 needed more than ever in engineering education for sustainable development. However, to date, little research has explored the influence of students\u2019 empathy on the outcomes of sustainable education. This project aims to explore this research gap. The main objectives of this project are to: 1) Provide an overview of empathy as a key sustainability competence; 2) Explore engineering students\u2019 and educators\u2019 understandings and experiences of empathy in the education for sustainable development; 3) Suggest ways to embed empathy into<\/em> engineering curricula for sustainability and education for sustainable development.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To achieve these objectives, the project will adopt a state-of-the art review of current literature and a mixed methods exploratory design to understand engineering students\u2019 and educators\u2019 experiences of empathy in their education for sustainable development. One of the main outcomes of the project will be a framework for integrating empathy in the education of engineers for sustainable development, and the European Green<\/em> Transition, in active and student-centred approaches such as Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) and Problem-Based Learning (PBL). A framework which defines empathy as a sustainability competence and enables the analysis of how empathy is understood and experienced by students while being educated for sustainability. The project will contribute with new knowledge to the field of engineering education for sustainability and sustainable development.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Climate change is pressuring countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. To tackle this issue, the European Green Deal aims to transition Europe to a carbon-neutral economy. This ambitious political and social goal impacts all sectors of society, including higher education in terms of how it prepares the next generation for the emerging green job market. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-5","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eee4sd.web.ua.pt\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eee4sd.web.ua.pt\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eee4sd.web.ua.pt\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eee4sd.web.ua.pt\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eee4sd.web.ua.pt\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/eee4sd.web.ua.pt\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59,"href":"https:\/\/eee4sd.web.ua.pt\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5\/revisions\/59"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eee4sd.web.ua.pt\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}