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Gender competence as part of engineering education can better prepare men and women to work on sustainable solutions that benefit entire societies. This chapter describes the framework and lessons learned of a community of practice (CoP) for gender equality facilitated by the Mediterranean Engineering Schools Network. Faculty and students from Mediterranean European, North African and Middle Eastern countries came together in this CoP, which was supported by the TARGET project, to develop a practical plan using a reflexive approach. The transfer of knowledge between generations is achieved by using participatory learning processes, facilitating mindful awareness, widening experiences, deepening understandings and building a gender-sensitive mindset. Students embarked on the journey to become change agents. The process led to the consolidation of gender equality knowledge, competence building and the development of change agents for gender equality. This CoP can inspire other institutions to undertake a participatory path towards gender equality – at local, regional, or global level.

Integrating sustainability into university curricula brings diverse challenges and conflicts as separate units vie for ownership of courses and topics. This case study presents a six dimensions sustainability framework developed at The Ohio State University to organize curricula under an inclusive strategy.

An interdisciplinary group of faculty focused on sustainability education engaged in a three-phased process including review of sustainability definitions from diverse disciplines; analysis of key aspects of the definitions in conjunction with course descriptions and learning outcomes; and identification of commonalities across the key aspects. This yielded six foundational dimensions of sustainability which serve as a means to assess curricular contributions across University units and topics. The six dimensions framework has been used in practice in multiple contexts.

The six dimensions framework provides a way to identify and foster diverse sustainability curricula efforts. It has enabled academic units to describe their disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives on diverse sustainability topics and the University to advance a broad sustainability vision.

The six dimensions framework provides a novel “big tent” approach to integration of sustainability into higher education curricula. The framework provides guidance about what counts as sustainability while maintaining the breadth that widens participation.