Centring Sustainability for Curriculum Redevelopment: Case Study of a Joint Spatial Planning and Transportation Engineering Program

Practice Paper Recommended citation: Mladenovic, M., Olin, J., & Johri, A. (2025). Centring Sustainability for Curriculum Redevelopment: Case Study of a Joint Spatial Planning and Transportation Engineering Program. In Kangaslampi, R., Langie, G., Järvinen, H.-M., & Nagy, B. (Eds.), SEFI 53rd Annual Conference. European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI), Tampere, Finland. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17631577. This Conference Paper is brought to you for open access by the 53rd Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) at Tampere University in Tampere, Finland. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. CENTRING SUSTAINABILITY FOR CURRICULUM REDEVELOPMENT: CASE STUDY OF A JOINT SPATIAL PLANNING AND TRANSPORTATION ENGINEERING PROGRAM M.N. Mladenović a, 1 , J.J. Olin b, A. Johri c, a Aalto University, Espoo, Finland, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3746-3573 b Aalto University, Espoo, Finland, https://orcid.org/ 0009-0004-6583-4302 c George Mason University, Fairfax, USA, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9018-7574 Conference Key Areas: Sustainability and society in engineering; Curriculum development and emerging curriculum models in engineering Keywords: curriculum planning; program assessment; strong sustainability; urban planning; transport studies; ABSTRACT Sustainability presents intricate challenges, revealing significant gaps between current engineering capabilities and societal needs. Previous research highlights notable progress in integrating environmental sustainability within engineering education. Despite this progress, not all disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts have integrated sustainability successfully; in particular, there is a lack of cohesive integration and sustainability appears as a solitary course within the curriculum. In this practice paper we report on an effort to not only effectively integrate sustainability but use it as a catalyst for engaging and educating stakeholders, encouraging them to question existing structures, methodologies, and values within the intention to facilitate a fundamental paradigm shift in program development. Our case comes from an MSc program in Spatial Planning and Transportation Engineering at a Nordic university, initially a brute-force merger of two disciplines, neither rooted in the concept of strong sustainability. By combining faculty workshops, surveys, and interviews, significant curriculum advancements were achieved. The revised program features a cohesive structure where core courses transcend traditional silos through a common thematic thread of strong sustainability. Moreover, a continuous assessment process was established through semesterlevel and course-level surveys, and alumni focus groups. Insights from this work include program-content changes emphasizing a unified framework and targeted outcomes. Integrating sustainability at the core of the MSc program has profoundly impacted curriculum design, while stakeholders express a strong desire to engage with the program, reflecting its transformative potential. The revised program induces engineering identity changes emphasizing planetary wellbeing and social justice, rooted in post-growth values of cooperation, solidarity, regeneration, care and hope. 1 Corresponding Author M.N. Mladenović [email protected] 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Sustainability as the common ground for curriculum redevelopment Sustainability transition of cities worldwide is at the centre of global sustainability transformation. At the core of that urban transition is the question of built environment planning and associated policies what should enable behavioural change and all the associated strong sustainability impacts (Verma et al., 2023; Wiek et al., 2011; Willamo et al., 2018). Despite the urgent need for integrated planning and policymaking for meeting sustainability goals, higher education in this area has been restrictive due to disciplinary divisions (Eräranta & Mladenović, 2021). The classical division is into two fields, one being spatial planning and another one being transportation engineering. These two groups form their own epistemic communities, with their different knowledge bases grounded in architecture and geography on the one hand, and civil and industrial engineering on the other hand (te Brömmelstroet & Bertolini, 2010). Due to the differences in the education and professional identities, members of the two fields face substantial challenges in understanding one another’s lexicons, operating procedures, and habits (Mladenović et al., 2021). Even though such issues in communities of practice (CoPs) have been highlighted before, there are limited attempts to address this issue in the domain of higher education. Only one previous study (Ferreira et al., 2013) suggests that curriculum development should aim for a holistic, non-specialised, understanding that bridges different CoPs in these two fields. Contrastingly, most of the previous engineering education research in this domain focuses on individual courses (Mladenovic et al., 2016; Machiani & Mladenović, 2018). In practice, across the globe, programs are still separated into those focusing on urban planning and those focusing on transportation engineering, often situated in different departments, and sometimes even different universities. As such, the gap between professional capabilities developed in these different educational programs is twofold. On the one hand, there are cross-disciplinary differences that must be spanned, as already identified in other fields (Kähkönen and Hölttä-Otto, 2022). On the other hand, since neither one of the disciplines has been originally rooted in the ideas of strong sustainability and planetary wellbeing, there is also a gap between their capabilities and the societal needs for the sustainability transition. Recent advances in engineering education research have already recognized the need for and provided flagship examples of how sustainability has been integrated into different engineering programs (Enelund et al., 2013; Roca Bosch et al., 2022; Verhulst et al., 2022; Mathebula, 2018; Thürer et al., 2018). However, most educational programs focus disproportionately on environmental sustainability and neglect other strong sustainability aspects such as cultural or political dimensions. Moreover, when the other aspects are discussed, it’s as part of a stand-alone course rather than a substantial treatment as part of the curriculum (Thürer et al., 2018). In this paper we present a case study of curriculum redevelopment for a master’s program in Spatial Planning and Transportation Engineering at a Nordic university. We demonstrate how embedding the concept of strong sustainability provided a common ground for both moving beyond cross-disciplinary differences and for aligning the education with societal needs. We draw lessons for programs that are planning or undergoing similar transformations. 2 APPROACH TO CURRICULUM DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT Curriculum design and development is a topic of significant interest within engineering education and with recent research advocating for a more iterative and continuous improvement approach to curriculum changes (Buyurgan and Kiassat, 2017; Cook et al., 2017; Johri, 2023; Matthiasdottir et al., 2024; O’Neill, 2015; van Berkum, 2024). To support this transition, scholars have proposed several frameworks to guide such iterative development (Cook et al., 2017; Gavin, 2010; Pérez and Aleu, 2009). These frameworks are rooted in curriculum design principles, ranging from those focused on interlinkage between courses (Meyers & Nulty, 2009) to those emphasizing learner’s agency in in the process of becoming professionals (Mitchell et al., 2021). Two highly recommended and complementary methods of assessment used in curriculum development are alumni and potential employer research (Buyurgan and Kiassat, 2017; Cook et al., 2017; Gharaibeh et al., 2015; Heitmann, 2005; Llorens et al., 2023; Pérez and Aleu, 2009; Saunders-Smits and de Graaff, 2012). Nearly all alumni research utilises questionnaires as its method, although other methods, such as interviews and focus groups, are also applicable. The questionnaire studies typically involve closed questions and quantitative analysis. Alumni research typically focuses on exploring (recently graduated) alumni’s views of the program they graduated from. Interview and focus group-based research, on the other hand, utilises semi-structured conversations, seeking a deeper understanding of topics such as graduates’ general (dis)satisfaction with the program and the skills and knowledge they had developed. Alumni research can also be conducted on graduating students. However, such research is more useful in exploring similar topics as student research. Employer research is, in practice, identical to alumni research, with the obvious difference in the study subjects (Llorens et al., 2023). Employer research is most useful in exploring whether the work life’s needs align to a sufficient degree with the program’s goals. 3 IMPLEMENTATION 3.1 Initial MSc program in Spatial Planning and Transportation Engineering The original MSc program was established as a top-down institutional initiative, combining faculty from two different departments. The program started accepting students in 2015, while the preparation work for it was done over several preceding years. This program, abbreviated as SPT, was a “brute force” merger of the two fields. The following program-level outcomes were initially established, although their mapping to individual courses was not conducted. Therefore, although quite comprehensive, these program-level outcomes were not implemented in practice, leading to disintegration of the educational contents across courses, and where sustainability has been addressed primarily in one core course. 1. Capability to integrate land use and transportation planning perspectives in planning work 2. Capabilities of planning though in a broader philosophical and historical context 3. Evaluate and recognize the sustainability approaches in planning & design practice 4. Construct a vision of what is required from the future transport system 5. Identify the main approaches in person-environment studies 6. Understand the meaning and possibilities of public participation 7. Able to analyze urban planning and policies 8. Strategic programming of planning and policy activities 9. Skills in data gathering and analysis in framing the planning problems 10. Apply own expertise and computational skills in the smart city context 11. Work in a multidisciplinary team in an urban development project 12. Interact, collaborate and communicate the project with different stakeholder groups 13. Can critically evaluate urban spaces from experiential perspective 14. Know how to gather reliable and valid knowledge from people 15. Interact, collaborate and communicate the project with different stakeholder groups 16. Critical reflection on the limits and potentialities of the Finnish Planning system 17. Elaborate the ethically reflective responses to planning problems 18. Recognize and reflect the work/role of a planner 19. Reflect personal attitudes towards participatory planning 20. Recognize and reflect personal experiences as user of urban spaces As for the courses, the initial program included 40 ECTS of core courses that are mandatory for all the students, as well as 40 ECTS of advanced SPT courses, that can be selected as electives. The MSc program also includes 30 ECTS individual MSc thesis project. More details are in Table 1 in section 4.2. 3.2 Development framework and process To develop a framework for curriculum redevelopment that would integrate sustainability, we made two key assumptions. First, integration requires learning by a range of involved actors, from course teachers to other key stakeholders, within and outside of the university. Second, integration requires transformative learning that opens existing structures, methodologies and underlying values underpinning the paradigm (Kolmos et al., 2016). In addition, we grounded our work as an extension of existing frameworks for curriculum development with the following seven competencies (Wiek et al., 2011; Willamo et al., 2018): 1. Systems-thinking competence: The ability to collectively analyze complex systems across different domains (society, environment, economy, etc.) and across different scales (local to global), thereby considering cascading effects, inertia, feedback loops and other systemic features related to sustainability issues and sustainability problem-solving frameworks. 2. Anticipatory competence: The ability to collectively analyze, evaluate, and craft rich ‘‘pictures’’ of the future related to sustainability issues and sustainability problem-solving frameworks. 3. Behavioural change competence: The ability to understand the principles of human behaviour and its change over time, and to apply those principles to design effective behaviour change interventions. 4. Multi-species competence: The ability to explicitly consider more-than-human actors’ capabilities and needs when developing solutions. 5. Normative competence: The ability to collectively map, specify, apply, reconcile, and negotiate sustainability values, principles, goals, and targets. 6. Strategic competence: The ability to collectively design and implement interventions, transitions, and transformative governance strategies toward sustainability. 7. Interpersonal competence: The ability to motivate, enable, and facilitate collaborative and participatory sustainability problem solving. Fig. 1. Curriculum development components (extended from Cook et al., 2017) Based on the above assumptions and framework, we implemented a series of activities (Figure 1). At the centre of curriculum development is the faculty learning and development community (Tinnell et al., 2019), consisting of about dozen responsible teachers for all SPT courses. The activities of the faculty learning and development community primarily focused on curriculum workshops (Schleiss et al., 2023), which were complemented with reading tasks. Feedback for curriculum workshops came from multiple sources including a longitudinal (2017 – 2023) semester-level questionnaire for SPT students (N = 131) and an exit questionnaire for each course. In addition, an alumni questionnaire (N = 56, app. 50% response rate) was deployed. The third source was a series of interviews (N = 15) conducted with diverse industry stakeholders in middle or higher management positions, and previously not educated within the SPT program. Finally, a set of inputs was considered stemming from several professional associations, the university constraints, and in comparison, with the closest benchmark MSc programs in spatial planning or transportation engineering among the peer universities across the world. 4 RESULTS 4.1 Key redevelopment aspects in line with the sustainability framework The following Figure 2 depicts the embedding of key learning elements within the seven-point sustainability framework. Fig. 2. Integration of core learning aspects within the seven sustainability competences 4.2 Program-content and implementation changes One of the key activities completed in the curriculum workshops was to refine the MSc program-level learning outcomes and map them to course-level outcomes and instructional approaches. 1. Evaluate human behavior, experience and contextual interactions 2. Evaluate spatio-temporal system dynamics across scales and sectors 3. Understand spatial, societal and political contexts in Finland and beyond 4. Understand spatial-transport governance in Finland in relation to other countries 5. Create scenarios of possible, probable and preferable futures 6. Create and communicate interventions across scales and sectors 7. Evaluate impacts of various decisions, policies, plans, and other interventions under conditions of uncertainty 8. Apply and evaluate various (qualitative and quantitative) data collection techniques and methods 9. Create and communicate different types of planning artefacts and processes, across scales and sectors 10. Create community capacity and ideas in and for groups of people, through a communicative process 11. Evaluate and mitigate ethical-moral implications related to planning and engineering Program-level learning outcomes were refined iteratively with the redevelopment of the core and elective courses (Table 1). The revised program eliminated any core course belonging either to spatial planning or transportation engineering and introduced electives with clear learning pathways grounded in the sustainability framework. In addition, semester-level questionnaires and annual alumni workshops were embedded as continuous program-development components. Table 1. Initial and revised course list for SPT MSc program Component Initial list of courses Revised list of courses Core Courses • Transport System Planning • Land Use Planning Systems • Transport Policy and Economics • Planning Theory • Systems Thinking for Sustainable Living Environment • Planning Studio • Thesis Seminar • Foundations of Plangineering • Planning Systems • Planning Theory • Land-use and Transport Policy • Planning Studio • Thesis Seminar Advanced Courses • Transport Modeling • Urban Experience • Traffic Flow Theory • Participatory Planning • Traffic Management • Urban and Regional Development • Smart and Liveable City Studio • Transport Modeling • Transport Economics • Urban Experience • Integrated Urban Transport • Traffic Flow Theory • Participatory Planning • Traffic Management • Urban and Regional Development • Planning for Planetary Well-being Studio 5 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION The first key lesson that this work provides is that two-fold integration of sustainability into an engineering program is both desirable and possible. On the one hand, embedding the strong sustainability approach allows for addressing the gap between engineering education and the urgent societal needs for sustainability transition. On the other hand, having sustainability as the common ground (Figure 3), allows for a novel approach to integrating epistemologically different fields of spatial planning and transportation engineering. As spatial planning is more dominantly rooted in the fields of architecture and geography, while transportation engineering is more dominantly rooted in civil and industrial engineering (i.e., the trunks of the two trees), this allows for effective integration despite their epistemological differences. Such embedding leads to a transdisciplinary set of core courses, while simultaneously establishing a complementary set of elective courses that can cater for diverse learners’ needs and capabilities (e.g., someone specializing in participatory planning processes as opposed to someone specializing in data analytics for impact assessment). The second key lesson stemming from this work is that transformative change is possible, if the curriculum redevelopment is grounded in the notion of strong sustainability. Such transformative change must tackle the root values underpinning the previous paradigms of both the specific disciplines. Besides their core epistemological differences, both fields of spatial planning and transportation engineering are traditionally rooted in a paradigm that was focused on weak sustainability, where economic sustainability and undifferentiated growth would dominate the mindset and methods. In contrast, transformative change has enabled the program setting in a range of strong sustainability values, spanning those of planetary wellbeing and social justice, and rooted in post-growth values of cooperation, solidarity, regeneration, care and hope for breaking out of current unsustainable path dependencies. Here, we recognize that the change in the underlying values underpinning the paradigm is still ongoing, as the strong sustainability paradigm is still emerging in practice. Thus, the ongoing curriculum assessment and development practices should actively be attuned to such value changes. Fig. 3. Seven sustainability competencies as the common ground for curriculum redevelopment Overall, this work provides a model for programs that are bringing together interdisciplinary domains to provide the future workforce with a more transformative educational experience that is geared toward helping them address the complex problems related to sustainability. We expect that this model can also serve other domains such as artificial intelligence where an ever-growing number of programs are looking to create new offerings that bring together core computing related knowledge with different domain applications. In conclusion, we believe that one way to bridge epistemological differences of when integrating different disciplines is to employ a third element that can act as a catalyst. 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We acknowledge the funding received from the School of Engineering at Aalto University, through a pilot project PRO-ASSET. We also acknowledge the help of Oya Duman and Susa Eräranta in conducting stakeholder interviews.