Sustainable Development and Diversifying Competencies Curricula

This paper explores the question how to approach thinking about curriculum construction for European engineering schools in the age of sustainable development. We present a theoretical argument that curriculum thinkers need to broaden their focus from the "restricted competences" paradigm (RCP) in curriculum thinking to consider how to make curricula within a diversifying competences paradigm (DCP). We claim that the best response to the challenge of sustainability is to produce more skill-diversity among engineers while simultaneously training engineers to make the most of this diversity. We support this claim with two arguments. First, we explore the problem-solving power of diversely skilled collectives, suggesting that this increases relative to homogenous collectives when confronting complex problems. Then we show that sustainable development is not only a complex problem, but an extremely complex or wicked problem. Based on these two conclusions, we propose a mixed-medium curricular model which illustrates how engineering schools might be reformed in order to produce greater student competence diversification.