A three-lens architecture for circular economy education: technical, economic, and psychosocial

Circular economy decision-making requires integration of technical feasibility, economic viability, and psychosocial acceptance, yet higher education courses often present these domains without requiring students to resolve cross-lens tensions under real-world constraints. This paper presents a circular economy teaching methodology developed and delivered at TH Köln, centred on a three-lens circular economy teaching architecture grounded in systems thinking accounts of feedback, unintended consequences, and trade-offs. The methodology was implemented through a designed 14-week sequence that combined lectures with embedded micro-interventions and three in-class exercises, with analysis based on group-level artefacts and instructor notes from the three exercises. The analysed outputs show that the exercises elicit lens-specific reasoning and recurring cross-lens tensions, including cases where technically feasible options become fragile under business model constraints or adoption limits, and that later exercises demanded more integration across lenses and stakeholders than earlier exercises. The results also indicate that integration does not emerge spontaneously from content exposure but requires active instructor facilitation and structured scaffolding through a sequenced progression of tasks. The results support the architecture as a transferable decision scaffold that makes integration an explicit performance through standardised lens questions, structured group artefacts, and plenary synthesis, while the evidence base remains qualitative and does not support strong claims about individual learning gains or causal effects of specific sessions.