Short abstract:

We review literature on engineering education to propose principles for a transformative education that better enables engineering graduates to address societal challenges, such as the climate crisis, in their career.

Long abstract:

Universities of technology are increasingly called to support society in addressing energy and climate crises, global inequality, biodiversity loss and other issues that collectively can be called societal challenges. Existing literature suggests reasons why current engineering education, at least in the Global North, is largely not responding to this call. Literature suggest that to respond to it, new types of engineering education would be needed which embodies principles that are in many ways radically different from the current education system. Such education would enable engineering graduates to address societal challenges in their career. In line with several strands of education literature, we refer to such education as ‘transformative’.

The aim of the paper is to report on a review of the literature on new principles for education in search for an answer to the following question: what principles distinguish transformative engineering education from non-transformative, traditional education? We ground our answer to this question with a discussion of the aims of a transformative education, i.e. societal challenges. We identify different types of challenges, distinguishing societal ones from others, and conduct an integrative literature review to identify principles of transformative engineering education.