Contribution to the first year EPFL Sustainability course

Séance de réflexion collective encadrée © EPFL / LAST / S. Yun

Séance de réflexion collective encadrée © EPFL / LAST / S. Yun

In spring 2025, the new interdisciplinary course on sustainability was launched on a large scale at EPFL, bringing together nearly 1,900 bachelor students from all disciplines to support their collective appropriation of these issues by students from the very beginning of their studies. This innovative educational program mobilizes a large team, including San Yun, PhD student at the Laboratory of Architecture and SustainableTechnologies (LAST).

In spring 2025, a pilot version of the Sustainability course ENV-101 was held at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne. This interdisciplinary course gathered almost 1,800 students from all EPFL departments. Designed to introduce systemic thinking and the major challenges of sustainability, the course offers an innovative flipped-classroom approach, combining weekly thematic videos, interactive online sessions, in-person supervised collective reflection workshops in groups of 60, as well as an in-depth group work of 5 students on a concrete case study.

Given the scale of the program, a multi-level logistical and pedagogical coordination was set up. Among the key factors for the smooth running of this first edition, the role of assistant coordinators (ACs) proved fundamental. Comprising 17 doctoral assistants from all EPFL doctoral schools, this team’s mission was to ensure constant communication between on-site needs and the teaching staff, oversee the workshops held simultaneously in 19 rooms and closely support the development of the systemic case studies by providing regular feedback and participating in the intermediate and final evaluations of the work.

Among these assistant coordinators, San Yun, PhD student at the Laboratory of Architecture and Sustainable Technologies (LAST), actively took part in this dynamic. Her involvement is part of the ongoing commitments of LAST, led by Prof. Emmanuel Rey, whose work explores transitions toward sustainability through interdisciplinary approaches. This participation in a transversal and systemic teaching framework such as ENV-101 thus reflects the laboratory’s determination to actively contribute to pedagogical transformation in favor of strong sustainability.