Education
The education project is under the flag of La Convergence
Our goal is to promote sustainability in EPFL and UNIL classrooms. In December 2021, we have organized a Workshop with La Convergence to brainstorm together about how EPFL needs to transform its curriculum to approach the current crisis adequately such that engineers have the knowledge they need. Thanks to roughly 10 students, we were able to identify 15 key topics as well as 5 possible dangers during the transformation. Later on, we drafted a report with the key outcomes, which was distributed to key stakeholders on the EPFL campus.
Together with the Vice Presidency for Responsible Transformation (VPT), we continued to discuss the advancements from both our sides and in April 2022, the Working group Teach4Sustainability (T4S) was created. This group is hosted by the Vice Presidency for Academic Affairs (VPA) and the VPT has a coordinator role. We are represented in T4S and work closely together with the VPT to prepare the contents and information. The aim of T4S is to create a guideline for EPFL on how to integrate Sustainability into the curricula’s. For this work, we did base ourself on the workshop already conducted but also organized two further workshop. One with a wider range of students, engaged in sustainability associations and AGEPoly on topics which have to be addressed during this curricula in their opinion. The second workshop was organized to dive into the social aspects of sustainability, in order to highlight these aspects as well (this one was focused on Polyquity, Planqueer members as well as the bureau of equity of the VPT).
This year we have also continued our collaboration with Roland Tormey from the Teaching Support Center to adapt his SHS master course „How people learn“. During the first semester, students learned about sustainability and pedagogy, and in the second semester, they worked with a professor on campus to help them implement notions of sustainability or ethics in the course. This year the second cohort finished and again, the program was received with remarkable positivity and teachers as well as students were thrilled about the outcome.
Further, we are continued working with Olivier Leveque, who gives the first-year course “Information, calcul, communication” CS-119. For the second time, we have given an intervention during his class to raise awareness about digital sobriety. Whilst finetuning the content, we are also accompanying him in order to integrate it permanently.
Contact Us
Location: Zero Emission Group, CH-1015 Lausanne
Email: zeroemissiongroup@epfl.ch