Samenvatting

Because understanding sustainability does not automatically lead to sustainable acting, we feel that additional awareness building should be necessary. Therefore a project is started in which a very old method, namely the Socratic dialogue, is borrowed from the founders and customized for the use in modern sustainable education and tried for its effectiveness in the engineering field. Other fields of education, for instance social work studies and law schools, have done something similar but with a different purpose.
Our purpose is to challenge and motivate students to internalize their understanding of sustainability into actual acting. Engineering education is the obvious choice for developing this 'internalizing approach' because companies expect that the engineering students of today will be the designers of their sustainable solutions in the future. But we also tested the Socratic approach in groups of entrepreneurs, managers and employees of companies.
In the Socratic dialogues we confront students with the inconsistency in the way they speak and act regarding sustainability and thereby challenge them to investigate and get a deeper understanding of what sustainability really is about. It is a completely different didactic approach from the regular methods but must not be seen as substitution. In our vision the method constitutes a valuable addition to the current courses for sustainable development, in fact we hope that it will establish a synergetic effect.
This paper describes the method and how we used it in our education. It gives our vision on its applicability for sustainability in engineering studies, recommendations about its use and some reflections on its contribution to the final goal: insight in sustainability must lead to effective actions in one's personal and professional life.