Author(s)

Liliana Chamorro-Hernández¹, Judith García², Darwin Casaliglla³, Martin Campos-Vallejo², Luis Núñez-Naranjo^4,5, Jorge Mina¹

¹Food Engineering Career, Carchi State Polytechnic University, Tulcán, Ecuador.
²Agricultural Career, Carchi State Polytechnic University, Tulcán, Ecuador.
³Computer Career, Carchi State Polytechnic University, Tulcán, Ecuador.
⁴Department of Pathology, College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
⁵Facultad de Ciencias de la Salud, Carrera de Medicina Veterinaria, Universidad de Las Américas, Quito, Ecuador.

As the world population grows, technologies are developed to improve food industrialization processes that are characterized by using large amounts of resources that modify social, economic, political and environmental systems that are the main components of sustainability. The incorporation of sustainability in Higher Education Institutions in Latin America is a relatively new process; it initiates with the implementation of study programs that promote a society responsible with the environment. The objective of this investigation was to diagnose the Creation Program of Food Engineering of the Polytechnic University of the State of Carchi (UPEC) in the substantive function “Teaching” to know the current situation in relation to sustainability. The main contribution of this research was designing a new methodology for evaluation of sustainability, taking the Sustainable Development Objectives from UN 2015 as a reference for calculating the percentage of sustainability contained in the curriculum. There were no references to similar diagnosis made in other universities in the world that could serve as reference for the present investigation. The percentage of hours with sustainability content was calculated as 24.15% considering teaching hours that showed sustainability contents, this was the Overall Sustainability Percentage. Human related courses presented greater percentage of sustainability. The most common Sustainable Development Objective was “Health and wellbeing”. The presence of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Objectives is evident but below 50%, presenting a possibility of improvement. There is a fertile ground for the incorporation of the sustainability approach in the career of Food Engineering in the UPEC, which with only four years of creation; it is a suitable institutional time to consolidate a commitment to food production, conservation and industrialization in a sustainable way, with the urgency demanded by today situation.

Higher Education Institutions, Study Programs, UN Sustainable Development Objectives

Chamorro-Hernández, L. , García, J. , Casaliglla, D. , Campos-Vallejo, M. , Núñez-Naranjo, L. and Mina, J. (2018) Diagnosis of Sustainability in the Food Engineering Creation Program of the Polytechnic University of the State of Carchi (UPEC) in the Substantive Function “Teaching”. Creative Education, 9, 1957-1968. doi: 10.4236/ce.2018.913143.