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Environmental and sustainability problems are not purely technical problems. Many of the most pressing issues, such as climate change, resource scarcity, and pollution, require holistic approaches that go beyond technical systems analysis and optimization. Such problems have been called wicked sustainability problems (WSPs) because they are highly complex, contested, and lack definite solutions 1,2 .Engineering education has the potential to play an important role in preparing students to contribute to deal with problems such as WSPs 3,4 . To be able to contribute in this way, students need to develop an ability to holistically and integratively understand and address WSPs while considering the normative context of sustainable development (here called WSP literacy). However, common practice in engineering education more commonly prepares students to address well-structured and tame rather than wicked problems 5,6 . One reason may be that working together to develop complex competencies such as WSP literacy is challenging for students as well as educators. Wiek, Withycombe, and Redman suggest that formulating and operationalizing intended learning outcomes (ILOs) for complex competencies can facilitate this difficult process and thus improve engineering education practice 4 .In this paper, we provide a preliminary matrix of 22 concrete ILOs for WSP literacy, as well as two different approaches to assessing (some of) them in engineering education. We expect that engineering educators will find these ILOs and assessment strategies valuable for adopting a constructive alignment approach for WSP literacy in their teaching.

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Background Engineering education must prepare students to assume professional and ethical responsibility for the societal impacts of technology, but most engineering students do not receive adequate ethics teaching. In fact, engineering education has been described as characterized by a “culture of disengagement” in which ethical and societal concerns are constructed as different from and less important than purely technical concerns. Purpose/Hypothesis This study explores how a culture of disengagement is discursively constructed and perpetuated in engineering education by analyzing the discursive construction of ethics and ethical reflection in an introductory engineering course in Sweden. Design/Method The study is based on extensive ethnographic data in the form of field notes, lecture recordings, interview data, and course documents. The data are analyzed using a discourse analytic approach rooted in discourse theory. Results The results illustrate five processes through which ethics and ethical reflection are articulated as not the responsibility of the specific field of engineering, irrelevant for the profession, of low quality and status, and not very important for the engineering degree. Conclusions The results contribute to understanding how a culture of disengagement may be perpetuated in engineering education. The results also point toward pedagogical tools and strategies that instructors and program managers can use to construct ethics and ethical reflection as an advanced skill that is an important and integral part of engineering and engineering education—and thus better prepare future engineers to become responsible professionals.