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Abstract

This essay chronicles the intellectual voyage of an ordinary language philosopher within a European Union-funded project (A-STEP 2030) using quantitative social science methods to define sustainability competencies for engineering education. Thinking through the standard ‘lit review’ and expert-validation procedures, it explores the philosophical and pedagogical perplexities emergent from arrogating a right to claim to know how to educate coming generations in order to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Drawing on thinkers like Cavell, Wittgenstein, Emerson, and Thoreau, it raises sceptical questions regarding the ways in which our intellectual tools may limit our capacity to shape a future different from our present, about the arrogance of expertise, and even about the possible limits of ordinary language as it is ordinarily practised to address the deep problems raised by the current polycrisis. Drawing inspiration from considerations on the ordinary language of astronauts, the text concludes that perhaps one way forward for ordinary language thought is to re-imagine the ways in which our uses of words rely not only on the self but also on our commonplace forms of life on planet Earth.

Keywords

engineering pedagogy, moral philosophy, perfectionism, philosophy of education, scepticism, Stanley Cavell, sustainable development education

Publication Date

2025-10-01

Publication Title

Journal of Philosophy of Education

Volume

59

Issue

5-6

ISSN

0309-8249

First Page

1113

Last Page

1129

Deposit Date

2026-03-03

Funding

Well, I come from America and this ‘research action’ occurred on the vieux continent. But more pertinently, I arrived from another school, from an almost self-taught world, where curriculum had always been a rather autodidactic book-to-book affair, with a philosophical encounter or (un)kind word mixed in on occasion, and here I found myself on a vessel bearing the flag of ‘sciences of education’, headed out to do what—to meet a white whale? Perhaps not, but not far from it. Our research project, generously funded by the European Union (EU), dealt with creating curricula to train engineers to achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs). It was entitled A-STEP 2030 (). We self-described our project as responding to the question of how to ‘better prepare engineers to meet the needs of society in this rapidly changing world’ by identifying the skills engineers would ‘need to help achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)’ and the means to ‘develop programmes to enhance those skills within engineering students’ (). To these ends we applied scientific approaches. We were impressed by the experimentally demonstrated potency of competence-based pedagogy, and we were wowed by exciting instructional innovations such as project-based learning (PBL). Many, many, participated in the project: other researchers, students, administrators, and industry representatives. We were a proverbially interdisciplinary convening, hailing from institutions in seven countries, but we were an even more international lot. To complete our research, we carried out fieldwork and interviews, we mined databases and performed statistical analysis. We did all that could be expected of researchers in the modern social sciences, covering the ‘quanti and the ‘quali’ in conformity with the latest methods, findings, and practices.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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