Case studies

The approach taken by Nanotechnology Engineering at the University of Waterloo has been to insert meaningful sustainability components into various courses, beginning with an exploration experience and ending with an opportunity for student driven discovery.

Two questions guided the process to determine this approach:

1. How can we provide an experience that brings an awareness of sustainability challenges to all students, and provides those who want to make an impact the opportunities to develop the needed skills to support innovation in sustainable development?
2. How can we deliver the above experience in a manner that has immediate impact, offers flexible structure to adapt to a changing sustainability landscape, and allows for the evaluation of the effectiveness of the delivery.

Nanotechnology Engineering is a very full program and offers little room in the curriculum for additional required courses. If sustainability were to be covered in an elective, this would need to be in more advanced years of the program and students would not have the opportunity to learn about sustainability development in a progressive fashion so they can explore increasingly complex issues.

A segmented and integrative approach was considered and ultimately pursued instead. This would add modules into existing courses, allowing students to benefit from a variety of perspectives as they continue to experience these ideas progressing through their studies. This approach allows for more flexibility and growth, however, also presents the challenge that it will need to be evaluated over time.

To pursue this approach, three main pieces were needed. The first was to identify supporters (champions) that are motivated to include this content into their courses. The second was to confirm a thread of courses that could support content ranging from introductory, to technical expertise, or student driven discovery. Lastly, broad statements were incorporated into course descriptions to anchor the content into the curriculum and stabilize it against drift and rotating instructors.

Regular evaluation from the curriculum committee was needed to ensure that gaps were being addressed. Due to rolling commitment to courses, maintaining champions was a challenge. Champions needed to be proactive communicating with new instructors for stable delivery. Additionally, champions needed to regularly communicate and coordinate with one another to identify gaps and repeats in material. Regular evaluation from the curriculum committee ensured that these were occurring.

As a result of this proactive effort, Nanotechnology Engineering has been able to insert meaningful sustainability components into various courses, building on one another from exploration to student driven discovery. Different points of focus and technical content in various courses allows for a distribution of approaches that can provide a spark and challenge to students as they approach this content in variable degrees of commitment. As they progress through their studies, student should see a thread. The specific points of contact are listed in appendix A.

Next Steps

Next steps can be categorized four ways; Communication and curriculum adjustment, effectiveness and importance, connections, and extracurricular portfolios.

1. Communication: The curriculum team considers how to maintain a dedication to delivering sustainability content that may seem peripheral to the core material of a course. There is a need to maintain momentum, interest, and adjustments as the curriculum team continues to try to identify gaps and overlap. There is a shift in instructor responsibilities as instructors become accustomed to having this content appear in courses throughout the program. This has led to a need for continuous communications. The curriculum committee will be reminded to reach out to instructors yearly to establish a connection between those who wish to explore more sustainable development content in their courses, with those who have already started this. Faculty can share a summary of what is currently being done with the curriculum committee to foster this. These channels of communication support faculty in this shift in responsibility.
2. Effectiveness and Importance: This change is supported by student interest in and desire for sustainability content. The high turnout of students presenting capstone design projects in Spring 2023 (17 total), where they wanted to be considered for the NE Sustainable Development Award, supports a high interest from that cohort. When Nanotechnology and Chemical Engineering offered the opportunity to other Engineering programs to join in a faculty-wide event, a competition between winners from each department as supported by the Dean, this immediately led to the distribution of the event across the faculty. Many of these group presented high interest in this space, even though their background in the field with topics covered in courses may not be clear. This speaks to how much students value this type of work, and the recognition that would come from an Engineering faculty award. Effectiveness of this delivery (sustainable development topics throughout several courses) can be evaluated from a student perspective in exit surveys. Here students can address their perspectives of whether it meets their expectations. It would be particularly interesting in these surveys to understand if students feel that this has helped them better prepare for their future employment. The first cohort to have experienced this integration from the beginning of their studies will be Spring 2027 graduates, and feedback on the integration into the full program can be collected then. NE is also considering surveying students as they progress in their programs to better understand the expectations they have.
   Moving forward it will be important to know the attributes and skills in this area that are important to employers of NE students. A Champion could help ensure questions are appropriately framed and report answers to the program instructors. This would allow the curriculum committee to tailor the approach and content in a modular fashion, analyze the effectiveness of certain activities, and have an adaptable process as employer demands and technological development change expectations.
3. Connections: This initiative hopes to foster connections with local experts and across faculties. For example, there is work being done through WIN on the impact of nanotechnology on sustainable development. The department could work in partnership to promote speakers and consultants for capstone projects that would enhance the connection between undergraduate students and experts in their areas of interest. Additionally, the development of interfaculty capstone projects, where students across all faculties could work on projects together, is being developed.
4. Extracurricular Portfolios: In addition to the previously noted exposure via curriculum components and potential engagement with the Capstone Design Sustainable Development Award, there are other routes where students could gain experience. Activities that target SDG content in clubs, volunteering, employment, research projects, or individual actions should also be supported to aggregate these experiences into their wider experiences while students at UW. This could be supported by staff within the Center for Teaching Excellence able to provide expertise and examine what platforms are being used across campus where students are trying to coalesce their experiences in order to better provide their future employers with a complete image of their work in this area.

1. Introductory Application (core LEC/LAB course)

NE 100 (1A): Hands-on experiment

2. Introductory Foundations (core LEC course)

NE 110 (1B): Group pitch presentations

Students are presented with an introduction to the fundamentals of chemical toxicity, fate and transport of chemicals in the environment and are asked to pitch an idea of how to Put UW on the Sustainability Map. In groups, they develop, articulate and support an idea they pitch to the Associate Dean of Engineering (UG) and the Director of Sustainability. With very little technical background, this exercise is meant to open the students to possibilities of how to think of a wide impact idea, while fostering collaboration, and let students reflect on the technical skills they wish to gain through electives while in their program.

3. Technical Applications (core LEC courses)

NE140 (1B): Introductory Circuits – module on Electronics Recycling

NE333 (3A): Polymer Science and Engineering – module on Life Cycle Assessments

NE 140: E-Waste process and Battery Recycling

Get NE333 Description from Leo

4. Experiential Application (to be developed, core LAB course)

NE 380L – Biotechnology laboratory

This new laboratory is scheduled to have its first offering in Spring 2026.

This course will be developed such that it can provide students with an opportunity to apply some of the ideas of sustainable development, and test these with hands-on activities. While we have not clearly articulated what these experiments may be, the consultation of NE instructors as well as a wider consultation with Engineering faculty will allow us to better identify the skills that could be best targeted by experiments in a laboratory setting.

5. Student Driven Exploration : Capstone Design Award (optional)

Capstone Design Sustainability Awards (Dept and Faculty level)

A pilot award was created with Nanotechnology and Chemical Engineering, whereby the capstone design project would be evaluated to determine winners, who were awarded a cash prize funded by the Sustainability Action Fund. The Dean of Engineering supported a faculty level award as the departmental winners represent their programs at a faculty level competition. External judges determined the Faculty of Engineering Sustainable Development Capstone Project Award.

For more information, contact the Nanotechnology Engineering Program Director.

The School of Planning at the University of Waterloo launches a new curriculum September 2024 that explicitly integrates sustainability and climate change topics into first and second year courses, and adds a required third year course: Planning to Confront Climate Change.

This update came after a thorough review of the undergraduate curriculum to understand where and how core content, including sustainability, was being covered in the program.  This includes meeting accreditation guidelines set by the Professional Standards Board for the Planning Profession in Canada, that includes adequate coverage of sustainability and climate change in the curriculum. Professional planners have long been considering sustainability issues in their work with climate change being identified as an important emerging issue by planning association across the country.  The curriculum review committee felt that covering climate change explicitly in the curriculum was important for the future of the planning profession in Canada.

Prior to the curriculum updates, planning students were already learning about climate change and sustainability in their courses, but the extent and depth of this was dependent on the expertise of the course instructor and the electives the student chose to take. The School of Planning wanted to ensure a more contextual understanding of the topics of sustainability and climate change as they related to planning scholarship and practice.

The curriculum review process included consulting faculty in the School of Planning. Feedback from consultations highlighted that both sustainability and climate change were highly relevant to the discipline and should be woven throughout courses over multiple years of the program. Others felt these topics were important enough to deserve at least one core course to ensure depth of student knowledge, alignment with accreditation's standards, and also send a signal to students about the topics importance.

During the consultations, the School considered what aspects of sustainability and climate change were foundational for planning students to know, how the content could be scaffolded throughout the program, what courses could cover these topics, and what courses or content could be removed to make room for new content. This development process was very participatory and rigorous to ensure alignment between program level objectives and changes made to each individual course. It was managed as a ladder and scaffolding – building on each layer as a student progresses through their studies. This ensured a deep and robust understanding of sustainability and climate change that was specific to planning would be woven throughout the program.

As the curriculum rolls out over the next five years, it will be important to continue to monitor and evaluate how the new curriculum meets the intended objectives. This will be achieved through regular discussion between teaching faculty as they develop courses and scaffold content, it will also require attention and reflection among faculty members teaching the updated and new courses to ensure students have the requisite knowledge to be successful in upper years. Finally, the School can evaluate student learning and experiences at the end of their degree to identified areas, topics and courses that need refinement.

The field of accounting and finance has been quickly changing to consider more aspects of sustainability. The School of Accounting and Finance (SAF) at the University of Waterloo recognized this change and then developed and adapted programs to prepare students for these new expectations, stay relevant, and meet the needs of future accounting and finance professionals.

The need for sustainability knowledge and skills within accounting and finance goes beyond a single course and is applicable to a wide variety of disciplines and areas of focus. There was a clear need for sustainability principles to be integrated throughout the program. As a result, the Sustainability and Financial Management (SFM) program was developed, joint with the School of Environment, Enterprise and Development. This program fully integrates sustainability and ESG principles and implications as it relates to accounting and finance across its courses. As with any new program, developing the SFM program required extensive coordination, collaboration, and planning.

As the SFM program was developed and launched, faculty in the School of Accounting and Finance recognized that students in Accounting and Financial Management (AFM) also needed more content on sustainability. Even if it wasn’t a focal point of their program, the business world was considering more aspects of sustainability, and the school needed to prepare students for this change to keep their skills relevant. They wanted to be proactive with changing expectations for future accounting and finance professionals as this would later be seen within their respective competency maps and requirements from core bodies of knowledge.

The SAF Sustainability Team meets frequently to discuss the role they can play to incorporate sustainability into their courses and programs. They also recognize and consider the ongoing conversations in this space in the business world and upcoming changes to Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) learning expectations for those pursuing the CPA designation. This team has mapped where sustainability is currently being covered and where it could be covered in existing and new courses. They also continue to discuss how sustainability is being considered in SAF broadly, including definition and application. Curriculum in SAF is continuously changing and adapting to consider the changes in the field of sustainability.

As a result of these changes and ongoing efforts, sustainability has become a competitive advantage for the school. CPA Ontario has recognized SAF’s strengths with research and thought leadership, and has collaborated with them through the SAF’s CPA Ontario Centre for Sustainability Reporting and Performance Management. Here they arecreating and disseminating leading-edge sustainability reporting and performance management research relevant to the accounting, financial, and business communities.To enhance the educational experience, all programs at the School are being impacted to consider sustainability more deeply as a result.

Content changes and grows quickly in sustainability, and there are not enough sustainability experts in accounting and finance to support this work. As a result, it can be difficulty to staff upper year courses in specialized areas, particularly in the new program. SAF needed to support faculty to first learn and then develop this content. This included working with SEED for training faculty, forming interdisciplinary connections, and developing and advancing curriculum for SFM, where SEED could provide more expertise on climate change and sustainability. Beyond SFM, faculty in SAF still needed to learn this content as well. Some have attended seminars, conferences, training, courses, etc. but this can be costly. Moving forward ongoing training and resources will be shared with faculty to support continuous learning for all faculty, to broaden understanding of sustainability, and to consider opportunities to further integrate relevant topics. SAF also faced the challenge of this change happening at the same time as AI and disruptive tech, so the need to continue learning and training is even more true.

The SFM program is the first of its kind in Canada, and it is already available with students enrolled. There is a high level of interest from employers for these skills and graduates are expected to be very hirable. With time, the reputation of this program will grow, particularly as students and employers recognize the value that these students bring to the workplace. The nature of the program is highly collaborative, and this will continue to be increasingly the case. Everyone needs to become experts in sustainability in their field over time as these issues will impact everything.

Within SAF, the Sustainability Team continues to meet, and this will be ongoing work for the foreseeable future. Courses within AFM will likely continue to be updated with sustainability content as relevant. The team will also continue to collaborate with CPA Ontario to understand and shape the expectations for students and to grow the understanding of sustainability and ESG for the profession.

As accounting and finance quickly grows and evolves to consider more aspects of sustainability, alumni will also need to develop this knowledge and these skills. As it considers what’s next, SAF considers what role it can play in supporting professionals in upskilling. This will also support the school’s reputation of leading in sustainability.

For more information, contact:

• Sasan Saiy, Sustainability and Financial Management Co-Director & SAF Sustainability Team Co-Lead
  • email: ssaiy@uwaterloo.ca
• Adam Vitalis – SAF Sustainability Team Co-Lead
  • email: avitalis@uwaterloo.ca
• David Ha - MAcc Co-Director & SAF Sustainability Team Strategic Management Representative
  • email: david.ha@uwaterloo.ca

Beginning on the academic calendar for 2024/25, Software Engineering at the University of Waterloo has added a requirement for Software Engineering students to choose one of their elective courses from a list of sustainability courses.

This was stimulated by Engineers Canada’s decision to include sustainability in their accreditation requirements for engineering programs. The change also came because it is important for engineers, including software engineers, to have some sustainability knowledge, particularly as it relates to their field. As Steve Easterbook outlines in Computing the Climate: How we know what we know about climate change (Oxford University Press 2023),computational models are important scientific tools for understanding climate change. This is a critical connection between software engineering and sustainability that students should be empowered to explore.

There were several degree plan design challenges in incorporating sustainability into the BSE:

• Cannot just add an extra course: degree is already over 40 courses.
• Engineering students typically have relatively few course choices. It’s important to respect student agency. Do not want to force all students to take a specific course and thereby eliminate one of their choices (they already have a lot of mandatory courses).
• Elective choice lists in engineering degrees are typically restricted to one category of courses (e.g., a natural science). Sustainability cross-cuts the engineering accreditation curriculum categories (natural science, humanities, mathematics, engineering science, engineering design).

The solution was to add a high-level constraint/requirement to the BSE degree, that students must take one sustainability course. That sustainability course could potentially fill a natural science elective slot, a humanities elective slot, or a technical elective slot. The total number of elective slots remains the same, the total number of courses required for the degree remains the same, and the students still have a good degree of flexibility and choice.

A similar approach is used elsewhere in Engineering for an ethics requirement, which can be satisfied by either an academic course or a PD course.

The list of sustainability courses added to the BSE plan was derived from the Sustainability Diploma. Each course included in the Sustainability Diploma was evaluated in terms of its prerequisites to see if was accessible to BSE students, and whether it was already included on the BSE natural science elective list or the Faculty of Engineering humanities list (“list C”). In some cases, the sustainability courses were added to those approved elective lists.

For all courses added to the BSE sustainability list, there was communication with the offering faculty/unit. Many of these courses are from Faculty of Environment, which was a supportive partner from early in the process, and actively engaged in productive conversation throughout.

Changing a degree plan is a long process that goes through many committees, starting with the local curriculum committee for the program and eventually ending with Senate. The undergraduate calendar is published once per year in the spring, so high school students can see the definitions of the degrees before they accept their offers. Changes published in the spring take effect the following September.  It typically takes 12-18 months from conception of a curriculum change idea to having it published in the calendar and taking effect that September.

This is the first step, and the team sees opportunities to do more over time. Hopefully down the road there is opportunity for a fourth year elective course that teaches SE students how to program climate models, for direct, relevant application of Software Engineering on sustainability problems. Such a course would also be of interest to students in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and related programs.

For more information contact Derek Rayside, formerly the Director of Software Engineering.

• email: drayside@uwaterloo.ca