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.

Reflection…

One of my biggest concerns about taking the PGCAP qualification is that I felt I may struggle to be able to relate and understand some of the non-technical (yet very valid) teaching and learning techniques, particularly that of reflective learning.  I’m sure that part of my lack of understanding will be unfamiliarity with the terminology and perhaps I’m already doing lots of these things, but I know them by a different name.

Today was my first lecture for the Engineering Construction module and the particular topic that I was delivering is all about sustainability.  The design of the lecture notes and accompanying presentations is intended to establish a principle where the students are able to define a set of sustainable values that they can embrace when they design to and that they can perhaps extend to other parts of their life.

I’ve been reading through a few^[1,2,3] texts about reflective learning and practices to try and understand a little better how I could perhaps start to integrate this into my lectures.  Clearly I’m going to struggle in lectures where I ask the students to undertake an engineering calculation where the answer is a finite number, but a module where they have to establish a set of principles and then apply them to various scenarios sounds ideal.

I decided that I’d set their homework for this week to try and promote an element of reflection, bearing in mind that my understanding of reflection is in its infancy and very likely to be clumsy and I’m seeking to improve this with practice and as I progress further into the PGCAP course I’m hopeful that I’ll start to embed this without even perhaps realising it’s reflection, simply a tool I can employ to help with my teaching.

The assignment that I’ve set a group of 120 or so students this week is to calculate their individual carbon footprints using the  WWF carbon footprint calculator and to then to reflect about how they could reduce their carbon footprint using the carbon reduction tools that are available.

I think this will help them to understand that some measures to reduce their carbon footprint are quite extreme and can impact the quality of life, whereas other carbon reduction techniques are quite straightforward and very easy to implement into even the busiest and financially constrained of lives.

I’ll be really interested to hear next week what sort of solutions they come back with… and how hard they think some of the carbon reduction techniques would be to implement into their lives.  I was never encouraged to think like this during my Civil Engineering degree, but then I didn’t really study any non-engineering subjects and I’d have relished being able to study sustainability… it always comes back to one of my favourite quotes by Ghandi “Be the change you wish to see in the world”.

[1] McDrury J, Alterio M. Learning Through Storytelling in Higher Education: Using Reflection and Experience to Improve Learning. London: Kogan Page Limited; 2003.

[2] http://www.itslifejimbutnotasweknowit.org.uk/files/whatisreflectivepractice.pdf

[3] http://www.cumbria.ac.uk/Public/Education/Documents/Research/ReflectiveTeachingGuide.pdf

Sustainability…

A couple of days ago I attended a meeting at the IStructE HQ to discuss how sustainability is and should be taught to undergraduate students at Universities and found the whole process really quite invigorating.

One of the most positive parts that I came away with was that a lot of the engineering staff genuinely felt ill equipped to teach a subject which isn’t based purely around some strand of physics or materials, with one quote coming from an academic that they weren’t happy about having to teach sustainability as it was like “knitting fog”.  I could relate in part to some of their reservations and I felt quite encouraged that there were lots of peers with similar reservations about teaching a subject that is continuing to evolve on a daily basis, however, I see it as a real opportunity and a fun challenge to develop a method of delivery that is able to convey the ever expanding nature of sustainable development and design.

Whilst I don’t think I came away with any new toys and techniques to necessarily teach sustainability, I think I’ve consolidated my approach to teaching sustainability and crystallised my thought process, bringing it back into line with the way that I design buildings myself.  I’m hoping that the PGCAP course that I’m enrolled on will give me some new tools to develop my teaching approach to the topic as I intend to base the module around value driven design and ensure that the students focus on outcomes rather than outputs.  The outcomes rather than outputs was a phrase I heard from Dan Epstein at the conference that suddenly gave me a real moment of clarity as I feel it reflects my approach to design and engineering, but I’d just never been able to articulate as clearly as Dan described it.  Course delivery on a non-technical aspect is really outside of my typical comfort zone, but I think if I can relate it appropriately to an engineering mindset then the opportunity for the students to ‘get’ sustainability is huge… fingers crossed I can master the art of reflection at lightning speed to get it embedded into my sustainability module.

My intention is not to teach sustainability from a numbers perspective or in a prescriptive format so that students are encouraged to blindly fill in the boxes to arrive at a ‘solution’ only to find out the principles of the design are fundamentally flawed which appears to be a common criticism of some of the other sustainability modules I’ve heard talk of…

Instead I’m going to try and stick to my underlying beliefs that if you promote understanding then the application of these values and the associated technical knowledge happens much more intuitively for the students.  I intend to deliver the module based upon a values approach, encouraging the students to reflect on how their design affects the environment from a variety of perspectives and for them to identify strategies for reducing the environmental impact for the area of design that they’re responsible for.

Critically though I want them to embark on identifying ways of aligning themselves with the other professional disciplines to deliver a truly holistic design approach as in my experience this is how quality design truly evolves when all the team members are fully bought into the overall design concept.  For example, what is the point of the Structural Engineer showing that they can shave £10k off a design, only to inflict a £30k increase on the M&E? No-one benefits from these petty shows of one upmanship or selfish design approaches but frequently I’ve seen all of the professional construction disciplines carry on regardless of their team members to produce an uncoordinated mess of a design, but I genuinely feel that this approach will be their downfall as clients become more and more familiar with a collaborative approach.

Dalby Forest Visitors Centre – Near Scarborough.

The voluntary work that I do with the British Red Cross is highly driven by a set of 7 fundament principles (listed below) which dictates how every volunteer and member of staff should conduct themselves and indeed these fundamental principles filter through to every aspect of behaviour within the British Red Cross.  I’m very familiar with these and when my brain is in Red Cross mode I intuitively assess my actions against this list to ensure that I’m adhering to their core behavioural traits.

British Red Cross’ 7 Fundamental Principles…

Humanity

The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, born of a desire to bring assistance without discrimination to the wounded on the battlefield, endeavours, in its international and national capacity, to prevent and alleviate human suffering wherever it may be found. It promotes mutual understanding, friendship, co-operation and lasting peace amongst all peoples.

Impartiality

It makes no discrimination as to nationality, race, religious beliefs, class or political opinions. It endeavours to relieve the suffering of individuals, being guided solely by their needs, and to give priority to the most urgent cases of distress.

Neutrality

In order to continue to enjoy the confidence of all, the Movement may not take sides in hostilities or engage at any time in controversies of a political, racial, religious or ideological nature.

Independence

The Movement is independent. The National Societies, whilst auxiliaries in the humanitarian services of their governments and subject to laws of their respective countries, must always maintain their autonomy so that they may be able at all times to act in accordance with the principles of the Movement.

Voluntary service

It is a voluntary relief movement not prompted in any manner by desire for gain.

Unity

There can only be one Red Cross or Red Crescent Society in any one country. It must be open to all. It must carry on its humanitarian work throughout its territory.

Universality

The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, in which all Societies have equal status and share equal responsibilities and duties in helping each other, is worldwide.

If I can devise a similar set of guiding principles for sustainable design for the students then I think that they can take those away with them for the rest of their careers regardless of whatever new technology develops or what measurement system is conjured up in the future… their relationship with design will still be driven by a universal set of values which hopefully will allow them to design beautiful, well crafted, sustainable, co-ordinated and well considered buildings…

By adopting a value driven approach on various sustainable projects that I’ve worked on over the years, we’ve been able to unshackle the project from the burden the a rigid measurement system can impart and as a result we’ve managed to deliver some excellent and sustainable buildings including Dalby Forest Visitors Centre which is shown in the above photograph.

Fingers crossed I’m able to develop a module that’s engaging and rewarding for the students…  I feel confident though that I just might be able to knit something out of the fog…