Unexpected…

Well the task that I set the first year students of calculating their carbon footprint has been completed and in some ways I have to confess to being a little embarrassed about underestimating their self motivation and appetite to learn.  In all fairness, this level of enthusiasm isn’t universal across all of the students, but I think that on the whole the first years are really willing to engage in some discussion about their experiences and to trust me in perhaps setting them of on a journey where they’re not sure where they will arrive.

Now you could argue that I should provide the students with a road map to show where they’re going, which I do in a very broad sense, but I don’t always share the finer points partly because from a very selfish perspective I love seeing their faces when that ‘ah ha!’ moment kicks in and they suddenly realise what it is that I’ve been trying to get them to appreciate during the lecture.

But the surprises can work both ways, some of the students are really very curious and they’ve started to use the carbon footprint tool to see how different aspects of their life stack up, one student decided to put his steam engine into the footprint tool and it managed to calculate that he averaged 46 tonnes/pa which is nearly 5 times the average, whereas one of the greek students ran his footprint via the UK and then the Greek version of the WWF site and found that his Greek footprint was half his UK footprint when using the same input criteria.

As a lecturer the sorts of questions these curve balls raise are really hard to predict and prepare for, but when they come they only serve to show the appetite to learn that these young engineers have and I’m more than happy to try and answer them as best I can… it’s really exciting when you see the students going the extra mile because their curiosity has been fired and I hope that enthusiasm and inquisitiveness continues and lasts well into their graduate years.

By getting the students to reflect on their own carbon footprints, they’ve gone off on all sorts of tangents that I couldn’t have predicted and they’ve clearly thought about how they can influence the environment that they live in, but in ways I hadn’t predicted or even encouraged them to pursue.  I’m sure some of them went off in less than productive directions too, but by giving the class enough time to discuss their findings to come back to a common understanding and by stating the rules of the class that they can make as many mistakes as they need to in the classroom and that it’s a safe environment for that to happen I’m hopeful that this contributed to the openness of the discussions.

Reflecting back on the process I think from now on I’ll try and encourage even greater abstraction of the central concept and try and encourage the students to be less and less constrained by conventional thinking in the tasks that I’m setting them to try and give even more breadth to the discussions in the class.  In the first week I gave the class the choice of either the running the lectures as a traditional chalk and talk session or if they were prepared to put the effort in with the reading of the course notes I’ve prepared out of lectures we could run them as a series of 2 hour tutorials and they all chose the tutorial option and so far it seems to be working well… let’s just hope that they can keep up the momentum and enthusiasm for the self based reading exercises.

Comparing this process back to the HE PSF I’m a little unclear which box it fits neatly into, clearly it’s relevant, but I think it spans across several key areas such as “how students learn”, ” Commitment to incorporating the process and outcomes of relevant research…” and perhaps even the discussion elements could draw parallels to ” Commitment to development of learning communities”.  Clearly one of the components of reflecting on their own sustainability and carbon footprints will draw upon large pools of research available within the media and also drawing upon critically reviewing the decisions that they are making in their own lives and in their professional practice (Laws and Loeber, 2011).

I’m hoping that through getting them to engage deeply with how they interact with the environment as a citizen and as an engineer, it will draw them deeper into a holistic and well rounded design thought process which will reinforce the ideals contained within (The Royal Academy of Engineering, 2010) and (The Royal Academy of Engineering, 2007) guidance documents.

There are various schools of thought that educating engineers about sustainability is a challenge (Swamy, 2000, Owens, 2011) but I think I might have just struck lucky with my class so far this year… I just hope that they’re as keen on the other topics!

Perhaps I should have expected the unexpected, but then how could I have expected such a barrage of questions out of the blue? After all nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, but long may it continue…

References

LAWS, D. & LOEBER, A. 2011. Sustainable development and professional practice. Engineering Sustainability, 164, 25-33.

OWENS, G. 2011. Transforming undergraduate structural engineering education in the 21st Century. The Structural Engineer, 89, 18-20.

SWAMY, R. 2000. Educating engineers: the sustainability challenge. The Structural Engineer, 78, 13-16.

THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING 2007. Educating Engineers for the 21st Century. London: The Royal Academy of Engineering.

THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING 2010. Engineering graduates for industry. London: The Royal Academy of Engineering.