- Email: [email protected]
Creating policy analysis skills in postgraduate engineering for sustainable development
Journal of Cleaner Production 14 (2006) 946e951 www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro
Creating policy analysis skills in postgraduate engineering for sustainable development D.J. Fisk*, A. Ahearn Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, London SW7 2AZ, UK Received 1 August 2005; accepted 1 November 2005 Available online 10 March 2006
Abstract A new sustainable development module for a taught postgraduate engineering course provided an opportunity to design and streamline taught content, using a constructivist model of student learning. The design process revealed that a key learning objective for a postgraduate engineering student must be the competency to analyse difficult social and political contexts. The success of meeting this need by introducing cognitive mapping, a technique previously used in operations research and social science, is reported. Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Sustainability; Cognitive mapping; Constructionist learning
1. Introduction The postgraduate engineering education in the principles of sustainable development has arguably received less attention in the literature in comparison with the school or undergraduate context (e.g. World Federation Engineering Organisations [1]). This is understandable. There is an obvious gain in embedding the principles of sustainable development as early as possible in the educational process. However, postgraduates offer two key advantages in any education strategy. First they bring with them a maturity and realism of outlook that was not available earlier in the learning experience. For example, they are able to challenge assumptions in the classroom rather than discover a disjunction with reality only when they try to apply acquired knowledge in the field. Second they are more likely to go on and lead an engineering project or change a management programme as soon as they leave the course. This paper explains the approach taken at Imperial College London, and in particular, reports the success of a method that enables engineers to engage in softer policy issues.
* Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (D.J. Fisk). 0959-6526/$ - see front matter Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2005.11.053
The UK engineering registrations authority, UK-Spec, is a world leader amongst its peers in requiring that a registered engineer be able to ‘Undertake engineering activities in a way which contributes to sustainable development’ (UK-Spec [2]). This is interpreted in terms of progressing ‘environmental, social and economic outcomes simultaneously’. As a requirement both for initial registration and continued professional development, this presents a new challenge to postgraduate education. The advantages of maturity and experience brought by the postgraduate student readily permit us to use a constructivist learning model as the basis of the design of our teaching but it also bring new challenges. First, a good deal of the teaching material on sustainable development used in earlier educational stages lacks frontline reality. While there are always ‘best practice’ examples to inspire, the postgraduate is more likely to have been exposed to the full picture, where ‘bad practice’ abounds, and will be eager to understand why this occurs. Second the student’s personal opportunity cost can be higher in postgraduate education, and so there is likely to be less patience with woolly ideas and a strong motivation to get to practical tools. This paper describes how we tackled these challenges in a new engineering for sustainable development module at Imperial College London at MSc level. Some of these challenges required a ruthless approach to available teaching material in
D.J. Fisk, A. Ahearn / Journal of Cleaner Production 14 (2006) 946e951
shaping what we chose to mean by ‘sustainable development’. These decisions are reported here, but principally to show how, step-by-step, they exposed a major skill requirement for engineers to be able to analyse for themselves an engineering problem in its full social and economic contexts. This requirement could have been an insuperable obstacle, and the main finding reported is the success of a technique imported from operations research and social science that empowers young, numeracy-orientated postgraduate engineers to analyse and take part in the discussion of social and economic issues. 2. Course content The new module does not treat engineering for sustainable development as a separate engineering sub-discipline, but as a way of thinking about engineering problems within any discipline or context. The course material is at pains to emphasize that engineering for sustainable development is not just ‘environmental engineering’ re-badged. The module is required to be taken with a core postgraduate subject, which can range from environmental engineering to transport to concrete structures. We list below the key steps we took in shaping this syllabus, acknowledging the expectations and skills of postgraduates. 2.1. The ‘definition problem’ We anticipated that postgraduates would be impatient with the confusion of definitions often associated with ‘sustainable development’. We decided instead to use a problem driven ‘definition-free’ approach. For example, the Brundtland Report is used as teaching material, not as a source of definitions, but as a series of case histories (depressingly current despite the Report’s 1980s vintage), where the key engineer’s question was ‘what was going wrong?’. 2.2. Focus on unsustainable development We focussed only on issues plausibly capable of causing development to falter, fail or collapse. Despite their great social importance, we excluded issues concerning choices between different styles of ‘good’ development that are asserted as sustainable. In this we closely followed the spirit of Brundtland. Attention on unsustainable, ‘bad’ patterns of development helpfully focussed attention on familiar general engineering concepts of understanding causes of collapse and their avoidance: the rhetoric of failure avoidance is central to the rhetoric of engineering (Ahearn [15]). Students then saw an opportunity to import some of their current skill set to the problem. A progressive collapse is characterised by a rate of degradation from equilibrium of some key system variable that itself progressively deteriorates the system’s ability to find a new equilibrium. This generic condition might describe the onset of a stock market crash, the spread of corruption in a commercial sector, soil erosion associated with deforestation, but equally a progressive collapse of a building or a pressure vessel. The careful choice of content and rhetoric about
947
sustainability meant that students were able to construct meaning from their prior engineering knowledge of ‘collapse’. 2.3. Identifying assets by thinking in four dimensions Students were invited to ‘think in four dimensions’: the three spatial dimensions in which they will already have cognitive skills, now together with the temporal dimension, visualizing how the realized design will then change through time. To deploy what students knew about onset of collapse, they needed first to be trained to identify the stocks or assets that they could be creating as engineers, and the implied future flows. For example, a new chemical plant design implicitly creates limitations as to how it might be modified in future and how it may eventually be disposed of. So much emphasis is currently placed on the ‘when new’ state of engineering artefacts that it required some practice and fieldwork to get the skill to extract the asset qualities from projects. 2.4. Three fundamental assets Once the skill had been acquired, it proved relatively easy for students to extend this thinking to include the social economic and environmental assets associated with a project. For example, building a new community using concrete materials created an asset. However, the community’s economic assets would need to have developed future revenue streams large enough to cover late life maintenance. If this wealth failed to materialize, the environmental assets of the community would degrade, its social assets would then decline with migration of those who could afford to do so, and its economic assets would be even less likely to be able to cover increasing depreciation of the fabric. These three classes of asset, environmental, social and economic, were taken as the simplest categories that exhausted the logical space of possibilities in a holistic analysis of the project, rather than any particular worldview of priorities. The students had exposure in their background reading to other sources that used more categories of asset (e.g. Ref. [17]) these were taught as different subdivisions of the basic three ‘capitals’, rather than additional assets to consider (e.g. ‘natural resources’ and ‘pollution’ were sub-divisions of ‘environment’ not new issues). This emphasis on sub-divisions as accounting conveniences, avoids re-emergence of the ‘plurality of definitions’ problem. 2.5. Not trade-offs Unlike debates about different styles of sustainable development, where trade-offs between capitals or assets are legitimate, there are no trade-offs in a study of unsustainable development. Students, particularly those whose personal inclination was to see environmental capital as pre-eminent had to learn to reason that the system is a three-legged stool: if one leg fails, the stool falls. Environmental failure can bring the system down, and often does because it is so poorly managed, but so can economic or social failure associated with an engineering project e ‘the only environmental lead killing
948
D.J. Fisk, A. Ahearn / Journal of Cleaner Production 14 (2006) 946e951
elephants is in poacher’s bullets’. A case study of the financial failure of a museum that had been devoted to teaching children the principles of sustainable development was used to ram home the point. 2.6. Mapping onto design and operation as a process To meet the students’ appetite for tools they could apply, we mapped these conceptual arguments onto a three-stage model of an engineering project (taken from the Royal Academy of Engineering [3]). The RAEng Design Group identified the three stages of progress through a project as 1. Need e Scoping 2. Vision e Design 3. Delivery e Implementation We then mapped different available tools for sustainable development onto the different stages, adding a post design stage ‘use’. The literature is relatively rich on early stage tools. For example, ‘scoping tools’, such as sustainable development indicator sets, are taken as applied to the vision stage. Tools such as life cycle analysis are taken as applied to the design stage. Tools such as real options’ analysis are taken as applying to implementation. 3. The problem One conceptualisation of the UK-Spec engineers’ registration requirement could be a world in which the environmental/ social/economic key outcomes were accurately balanced by a client brief which took into account specific legislative requirements directed to ensure sustainable development. In this world the learning objective would be to develop a skill (again to quote UK-Spec) to realise such a brief by ‘use of imagination, creativity and innovation’, relevant to the student’s respective engineering discipline. Scoping tools, such as sustainable development indicators, would be a means to strip out the essential elements in the brief. While such a conceptualisation has its place, especially for exemplar engineering projects, it is hard to argue that this is the world in which most projects experienced by postgraduates will exist. In reality, the engineer in the 21st century will have to take an active, not passive, part in balancing these outcomes. This was emphasized by what many commentators viewed as the mixed outcome of the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD). Had the course followed on from the 1992 World Summit on Environment and Development, it would have been natural to have been based on implementing a ‘client brief’ drawn from Agenda 21 [4] and the new international legal instruments. No such legitimised outcome was associated with the ‘Jo’burg Summit’. Indeed, the diplomatic sessions were generally viewed as overshadowed by the civil society sessions (e.g. ENDS [5]) and so-called Type II actions. Here engineers played a significant part, not only in proposing solutions but scoping agendas. For example, the ‘Toronto Declaration’ by global mining companies represented one such
initiative (Minerals Mining and Sustainable Development [6]), which would have been inconceivable a few years before. All this requires skills which are not taught on a conventional technology-focussed engineering course. The question for the new module was how to teach skills in analysing problems that had strong and complex social dimensions, in a relatively short window of time. Teaching postgraduate engineers a working knowledge of the techniques and skills is a challenge, even more so because the sustainability module is only 20% of their taught Masters course: the other 80% is classic, specialist engineering. As teachers, we could not rely on deep immersion in a single discipline to impart the mindset required for the understanding of sustainable development now required by engineering registration requirements. An obvious problem when drawing students onto an optional module from seven core courses is that the selection and admission of students is based on their suitability for the main core course. Therefore, whilst entry criteria for the straight core course are controlled, it is diverse for sustainability and no prerequisites can be set. The module was not promoted as a soft option, rather the reverse, with very challenging coursework, but also the promise of dealing with real world problems in all their complexity. As an example, one of the most popular components of the course in the student evaluation was a ‘wicked problem’ case study of infrastructure development in the perplexingly troubled context of Sandoval (based on Ref. [19]). The design of the sustainable development module therefore had to presume that students, while having the strong motivation characteristic of an elective module, would have little or no background in the subject, and little or no background in the learning strategies, skills and techniques needed for analysing real-life situations. Therefore the teaching method, as well as content, of the module had to be thought out. However, the project scoping stage presented a challenge because to create and use some of these indicators students needed to extract non-numerical information about complex economic and social systems. Bearing in mind that the student intake by definition favours those with strong engineering scientific academic qualifications, there was every reason to assume that critical evaluation and analysis using social science methods applied to textual source material would be problematic. The first step towards a solution was to clearly delineate the problem. We assumed that while engineering students may have special skills compared with their peers in understanding complex diagrammatic representations of systems, they may not have similar skills in comprehending complex economic and social relationships when the source material was expressed ‘linearly’ as text. A sample of our own engineering textbooks revealed that around 30e50% of page space was devoted to diagrammatic or symbolic material. This contrasts with a comparable sample of textbooks for legal students, which had less than 5% of non-text space, despite the implicit logical structure that underlies legal codes. Much of the available material on the economic and social aspects of sustainable development
D.J. Fisk, A. Ahearn / Journal of Cleaner Production 14 (2006) 946e951
is in the latter form. We wanted to give students confidence in analysing threats to sustainable development, to the point at which they were able to challenge clients and project definitions. For the most able student, our intended outcome was an ability to use analysis to appraise options and even create systems dynamics models of real situations that could be brought to the dialogue with stakeholders. We conjecture that problems encountered by engineering students with the concept of sustainability, reported elsewhere (Carew and Mitchell [7]), may in part be caused by this difficulty of transferring ideas from one format to another. Our problem was to find a means of helping students bridge the social science gap in a short time. The solution reported here draws on a technique developed by fieldwork sociologists, the cognitive map. 4. Using cognitive mapping The cognitive map hypothesis supposes that individuals or groups approach new problems with a set of assumptions about causal relationships already in place. Further it claims that this map of relationships is used to make sense of the new problem. Sociologists have a strong research interest in eliciting this map and have identified a number of tools for fieldwork. There is a wide range of related techniques. We decided on the simple cognitive map, as described by Ackerman et al. [8] for three reasons. First, it is suitable for building a map of an issue that can be created and shared by a group (e.g. Shaw et al. [9]). It therefore has an added value to the student as a potential tool for stakeholder engagement. Second, it has been successfully used as a basis for Operations Research modelling and so offered promise that it would work with engineering students. Third, software is available to support rapid modification and development of maps (e.g. Ref. [10]). The software only organises the topology of the map, but
949
this saves considerable time over, say, a non-interactive white board or post-it notes and removes any inhibition against totally redrawing a partially completed complex map. Our adaptation of the cognitive map process was to convert it from an interview tool to a textual analysis tool. The steps are as follows: 1. Identify the individual ideas in a piece of text and extract as box elements. 2. Create causal links between them as implied by the text. 3. Review the resultant map to remove redundancy. 4. Re-arrange the map to give structural emphasis. 5. Test the map’s interpretative power for interventions. As an illustration of the technique the part of the Introduction section has been mapped at Fig. 1, which shows the result at step 4. The map has been grouped so that the external world, teaching resource and student skills cluster. An interpretation is that it is the prevalence of bad practice that pushes the course towards this approach. These deceptively simple steps need considerable practice. From an educational theory point of view the use of cognitive mapping accords with a constructivist learning theory. That is, individuals and groups take new information and construct meaning from it, in light of what they already know. A difficulty with cognitive mapping is that ‘what we already know’ can impede the ability to map effectively: this is well known within constructivist learning theory. Shifting a learner’s assumptions will not happen automatically with the acquisition of new information: the learner may need to be helped to see that their prior ideas, beliefs, habits or assumptions need to be recognised and challenged. This will be seen in the description of our experience of teaching cognitive mapping to our students.
‘good practice’ inspires, ‘bad practice’ abounds, earlier stages teaching material on sustainable development lacks frontline reality. maturity and experience of postgraduate student use a constructivist learning model Postgraduate more likely to have been exposed to full picture,
student’s personal opportunity cost can be high
less patience with woolly ideas
strong motivation to get to practical tools.
Fig. 1. Example of a simple cognitive map created from the Introduction.
Teach cognitive mapping
950
D.J. Fisk, A. Ahearn / Journal of Cleaner Production 14 (2006) 946e951
In the first session students were given a piece of text from UNEP’s Global Environmental Outlook 3 [11] presented to the WSSD that explained the social and economic pressures behind the spread of HIV in Africa. This was not such a remote problem for practical engineering as might first appear. In some parts of the world HIV and workers’ health are predominant concerns of engineers managing minerals extraction [6]. Students correctly identified the ideas contained in the passage but characteristically stumbled at two points. A common problem was a failure to realise that they had imported ideas from their own internal cognitive maps as well as from the set text. A second and related difficulty was avoiding drawing maps in which everything ended up dependent on everything else. The problem here was lack of practice in distinguishing between primary causes and secondary influences and associations. The teaching approach was to focus on the links as causal propositions that needed to be defended, allowing only the material provided by the text as evidence. This experience flags the point that engineering students studying sustainable development may well find problems with assessing dispassionately social and economic evidence unless they receive special training. While passion is to be commended it can easily interfere with all the key principles of involving stakeholders. There was a notable shift in student capability after three exercises. Early stages in the learning process involved producing a defensible map (few samples of text of any length are so definitive that they lead to a unique map). Once this stage was mastered the student was able to turn to what the map should visually ‘say’ when viewed as a holistic diagram. For example, students were asked to analyse a newspaper report on the disposal of the Clemenceau aircraft carrier [18]. The story is a good example of real world complexity engulfing an engineering problem. The ship had been sold for recycling as scrap, but, because of a large asbestos burden, a specialist contractor had been employed. The article reported that the ship had slipped past satellite tracking by the French authorities, and had been sighted heading for a Third World port where costs and environmental standards were much lower. Amongst other threads in the article was reference to the ambiguous status under international maritime law of ships at sea bound for scrap. A cognitive map of a newspaper article can be difficult to assemble because ideas in a Press report are often organised in a tree of descending impact to facilitate editing into available space and skim reading. The students were asked to map the article and then propose a technical solution to avoid such problems. The well-organised maps picked up a small reference to poor enforcement of some maritime regulations as the central causal feature from which most of the narrative flowed. Topologically reconfigured, this became the organising feature of the map. Students who got to this stage suffered a conversion from using the map as simply a 1-1 mapping tool, to an insight in the underlying processes that straight reading might have missed. As a consequence, in proposing their solution, they were alert to the likely failure of a simple technical solution (e.g. a register of asbestos content), and the importance of a proposal that would address the performance of the
regulators as well as the regulated. In post course evaluation students ranked the map sessions highly. Indeed students on other more conventional modules were reported as fascinated as to what their colleagues were discovering through the technique. Similar positive reaction to the use of cognitive maps has been reported on another postgraduate course with which one of the authors is associated [14]. 5. Moving to systems dynamics A cognitive map once completed has another advantage in teaching sustainable development. The Imperial course, like many others, is based upon an approach to sustainable development that requires simultaneous management of environmental, social and economic assets and not just flows e designing in the fourth dimension. Ideally all three assets should grow with time, though in practice some elements of each asset may be irreversibly converted to another and the issue is then whether the conversion is justified and retains overall sustainability. A map easily exposes ideas that work as ‘stocks’ (i.e. ‘substantive elements’ that are carried over from one time period to another). In engineering terms ‘stocks’ are the state variables of the system. If the stocks have been correctly identified, their value at one point in time should enable the model to estimate their future values. Changes in stocks between one time interval and the next represent the ‘flows’ (i.e. changes to those stocks through conversion, consumption and investment). The remainder of the map yields the ‘relationships’ that define the immediate flows in terms of current stocks values. So a cognitive map of a problem provides a convenient conversion of text to the state space formalism (where stocks are the state variables and flows their rate of change) used in systems dynamics. Indeed the original Limits to Growth World Model [12] might be viewed as a rather untidy cognitive map with eight state variables. Even the fragment of narrative presented in Fig. 1 is suggestive of stocks reflecting the state of the world, the incoming knowledge of students and the teaching resource. As a final component of this arm of the course, we encouraged students to represent their ideas in a systems dynamics format. Forrester argued almost 30 years ago that social science failed to give adequate priority to social dynamics and too much emphasis on snapshots [13]. An inhibition to using systems dynamics in the past is that the technique appears to need specialist simulation software. Some simple points can be made in class using normal spreadsheet software, but this has limitations. Using each column to represent a new time period requires the model’s formula to be repeated in every row and so provides an unhealthy pressure to simplify the model. Worse the use of columns to represent time periods in practice leads to coarse time intervals that can introduce spurious instability in the dynamics. We elected instead to use the spreadsheet to give a full annotated (and drawing enhanced) description of how the state variables were related to their values at the next time increment according to the cognitive map model. When the model was built the cells that contained the ‘previous’ values of the state variables were put equal to
D.J. Fisk, A. Ahearn / Journal of Cleaner Production 14 (2006) 946e951
the appropriate cell containing their ‘next’ values. If the facility to ‘iterate’ is checked in the Tools Menu, this assignment results in the spreadsheet cycling the chosen number of iterations, and so stepping through the model’s time history before the student’s eyes. The only restriction for students to remember is that the cycling moves through the spreadsheet row by row. To avoid using a cell value that has not been updated the casual flow of the model needs to be down the spreadsheet not along the rows. It is a sobering reflection on the growth in computing power that Forrester’s World Model I can be written on a single screen fully documented with comments and flow paths and can simulate a 1000 years in a few seconds. One of the great advantages of a systems dynamics formulation is that it concurs with the student’s perceptions of dynamical modelling, at the same time forcing recognition of qualitative components of a problem. 6. The learning outcomes The learning outcomes for this particular aspect of sustainability appear to have been met from an evaluation by teachers whilst dealing with the students in the classroom using the software. That is, the significant improvement in students’ abilities to construct meaningful maps was apparent even without formal assessment. However, formal assessment has been designed to test the students’ learning outcomes for perceived usefulness and learning gain. The evaluation process has included written questionnaires but also informal conversations with students after lectures and between lectures. Discussion amongst the teaching team reveals good satisfaction with the students’ grasp of alien, complex ideas in a short space of time. By the end of this section, students had confidence that they could unravel a complex piece of textual information so as to be able to propose a technological intervention that took account of social and economic factors. They fulfilled Bruner’s constructivist criteria that recognise good learning when students can simplify, generate new propositions and increase the manipulation of information [16]. Team leader’s self-reflection has yielded ideas for refinements next year (principally that a systems dynamic experiment could be introduced earlier) but sufficient satisfaction to allow the module to remain substantially unchanged for the second iteration. The teaching method may be refined with the acquisition of licenses for a virtual learning environment but this is not absolutely necessary and would depend on finding learning technologist support to create a system with any significant advantage over current provision. 7. Conclusion We have seen that the new engineering for sustainable development at Imperial College London faced problems of not only selecting content for a brief but high level introduction to
951
the issue, but also problems of facilitating the acquirement of a different mindset from that which they would use normally in the rest of the learners’ specialist advanced engineering studies. The design of lectures to demonstrate the four stage model of process/product engineering, namely scoping, design, implementation and use, provided a useful framework for selecting the content of the syllabus but presented a pedagogical problem of how to teach ‘‘scoping’’. The only solution to helping students grapple with the social science analysis required for the ‘‘scoping’’ process was to provide them supported learning on cognitive mapping using software that made it feasible for the students to change and refine their ideas as they constructed the maps. The fact that such software is an underappreciated component of most standard software packages meant that there were no resource constraints against this form of e-learning. With the software for cognitive mapping, students could adopt a self-evaluative and self-corrective approach. This allowed significant development in the students’ skills to be seen in only 3 weeks worth of lectures and emphasized that cross-disciplinary studies over the science/social science boundaries are feasible even in specialist scientific institutions. This has been confirmed by successive student evaluations where this component of the module consistently scored highly for interest and usefulness.
References [1] WFEO engineering education and training for sustainable development conference, Paris; 1997. [2] UK-Spec engineering council; 2004. [3] Royal Academy of Engineering design principles; 2002. [4] UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Agenda 21; 1992. [5] ENDS Report 332; Sep 2002. [6] MMSD breaking new ground. Earthscan; 2002. [7] Carew AL, Mitchell CA. Characterizing undergraduate engineering students’ understanding of sustainability. Eur J Eng Educ 2002;27(4): 349e61. [8] Ackerman F, Eden C, Cropper S. Cognitive mapping: a user’s guide, Working paper 90/2, University of Strathclyde Management Science; 1992. [9] Shaw D, Ackerman F, Eden C. Approaches to sharing knowledge in group problem solving. J Oper Res Soc 2003;54:936e48. [10] Decision explorer. www.banxia.com. [11] Global Environmental Outlook 3, UNEP. Earthscan; 2002. [12] Meadows D. Limits to growth. Earthscan; 1972. [13] Forester J. Industrial dynamics. MIT Press; 1968. [14] Fenner R. Private communication centre for sustainable development. University of Cambridge. [15] Ahearn AL. Words fail us: the pragmatic need for rhetoric in engineering communication. Global J Eng Educ 1998. [16] Bruner J. Toward a theory of instruction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 1966. [17] UK government sustainable development strategy. Cmd 6467 TSO London; 2005. [18] Financial Times. High environmental costs spell trouble on high seas; Nov 5, 2003. [19] Rose WI, Bommer JJ, Sandoval CA. Natural hazards and risk mitigation in El Salvador. Geol Soc Am Spec Pap 2004;375:1e4.
Creating policy analysis skills in postgraduate engineering for sustainable development D.J. Fisk*, A. Ahearn Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, London SW7 2AZ, UK Received 1 August 2005; accepted 1 November 2005 Available online 10 March 2006
Abstract A new sustainable development module for a taught postgraduate engineering course provided an opportunity to design and streamline taught content, using a constructivist model of student learning. The design process revealed that a key learning objective for a postgraduate engineering student must be the competency to analyse difficult social and political contexts. The success of meeting this need by introducing cognitive mapping, a technique previously used in operations research and social science, is reported. Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Sustainability; Cognitive mapping; Constructionist learning
1. Introduction The postgraduate engineering education in the principles of sustainable development has arguably received less attention in the literature in comparison with the school or undergraduate context (e.g. World Federation Engineering Organisations [1]). This is understandable. There is an obvious gain in embedding the principles of sustainable development as early as possible in the educational process. However, postgraduates offer two key advantages in any education strategy. First they bring with them a maturity and realism of outlook that was not available earlier in the learning experience. For example, they are able to challenge assumptions in the classroom rather than discover a disjunction with reality only when they try to apply acquired knowledge in the field. Second they are more likely to go on and lead an engineering project or change a management programme as soon as they leave the course. This paper explains the approach taken at Imperial College London, and in particular, reports the success of a method that enables engineers to engage in softer policy issues.
* Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (D.J. Fisk). 0959-6526/$ - see front matter Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2005.11.053
The UK engineering registrations authority, UK-Spec, is a world leader amongst its peers in requiring that a registered engineer be able to ‘Undertake engineering activities in a way which contributes to sustainable development’ (UK-Spec [2]). This is interpreted in terms of progressing ‘environmental, social and economic outcomes simultaneously’. As a requirement both for initial registration and continued professional development, this presents a new challenge to postgraduate education. The advantages of maturity and experience brought by the postgraduate student readily permit us to use a constructivist learning model as the basis of the design of our teaching but it also bring new challenges. First, a good deal of the teaching material on sustainable development used in earlier educational stages lacks frontline reality. While there are always ‘best practice’ examples to inspire, the postgraduate is more likely to have been exposed to the full picture, where ‘bad practice’ abounds, and will be eager to understand why this occurs. Second the student’s personal opportunity cost can be higher in postgraduate education, and so there is likely to be less patience with woolly ideas and a strong motivation to get to practical tools. This paper describes how we tackled these challenges in a new engineering for sustainable development module at Imperial College London at MSc level. Some of these challenges required a ruthless approach to available teaching material in
D.J. Fisk, A. Ahearn / Journal of Cleaner Production 14 (2006) 946e951
shaping what we chose to mean by ‘sustainable development’. These decisions are reported here, but principally to show how, step-by-step, they exposed a major skill requirement for engineers to be able to analyse for themselves an engineering problem in its full social and economic contexts. This requirement could have been an insuperable obstacle, and the main finding reported is the success of a technique imported from operations research and social science that empowers young, numeracy-orientated postgraduate engineers to analyse and take part in the discussion of social and economic issues. 2. Course content The new module does not treat engineering for sustainable development as a separate engineering sub-discipline, but as a way of thinking about engineering problems within any discipline or context. The course material is at pains to emphasize that engineering for sustainable development is not just ‘environmental engineering’ re-badged. The module is required to be taken with a core postgraduate subject, which can range from environmental engineering to transport to concrete structures. We list below the key steps we took in shaping this syllabus, acknowledging the expectations and skills of postgraduates. 2.1. The ‘definition problem’ We anticipated that postgraduates would be impatient with the confusion of definitions often associated with ‘sustainable development’. We decided instead to use a problem driven ‘definition-free’ approach. For example, the Brundtland Report is used as teaching material, not as a source of definitions, but as a series of case histories (depressingly current despite the Report’s 1980s vintage), where the key engineer’s question was ‘what was going wrong?’. 2.2. Focus on unsustainable development We focussed only on issues plausibly capable of causing development to falter, fail or collapse. Despite their great social importance, we excluded issues concerning choices between different styles of ‘good’ development that are asserted as sustainable. In this we closely followed the spirit of Brundtland. Attention on unsustainable, ‘bad’ patterns of development helpfully focussed attention on familiar general engineering concepts of understanding causes of collapse and their avoidance: the rhetoric of failure avoidance is central to the rhetoric of engineering (Ahearn [15]). Students then saw an opportunity to import some of their current skill set to the problem. A progressive collapse is characterised by a rate of degradation from equilibrium of some key system variable that itself progressively deteriorates the system’s ability to find a new equilibrium. This generic condition might describe the onset of a stock market crash, the spread of corruption in a commercial sector, soil erosion associated with deforestation, but equally a progressive collapse of a building or a pressure vessel. The careful choice of content and rhetoric about
947
sustainability meant that students were able to construct meaning from their prior engineering knowledge of ‘collapse’. 2.3. Identifying assets by thinking in four dimensions Students were invited to ‘think in four dimensions’: the three spatial dimensions in which they will already have cognitive skills, now together with the temporal dimension, visualizing how the realized design will then change through time. To deploy what students knew about onset of collapse, they needed first to be trained to identify the stocks or assets that they could be creating as engineers, and the implied future flows. For example, a new chemical plant design implicitly creates limitations as to how it might be modified in future and how it may eventually be disposed of. So much emphasis is currently placed on the ‘when new’ state of engineering artefacts that it required some practice and fieldwork to get the skill to extract the asset qualities from projects. 2.4. Three fundamental assets Once the skill had been acquired, it proved relatively easy for students to extend this thinking to include the social economic and environmental assets associated with a project. For example, building a new community using concrete materials created an asset. However, the community’s economic assets would need to have developed future revenue streams large enough to cover late life maintenance. If this wealth failed to materialize, the environmental assets of the community would degrade, its social assets would then decline with migration of those who could afford to do so, and its economic assets would be even less likely to be able to cover increasing depreciation of the fabric. These three classes of asset, environmental, social and economic, were taken as the simplest categories that exhausted the logical space of possibilities in a holistic analysis of the project, rather than any particular worldview of priorities. The students had exposure in their background reading to other sources that used more categories of asset (e.g. Ref. [17]) these were taught as different subdivisions of the basic three ‘capitals’, rather than additional assets to consider (e.g. ‘natural resources’ and ‘pollution’ were sub-divisions of ‘environment’ not new issues). This emphasis on sub-divisions as accounting conveniences, avoids re-emergence of the ‘plurality of definitions’ problem. 2.5. Not trade-offs Unlike debates about different styles of sustainable development, where trade-offs between capitals or assets are legitimate, there are no trade-offs in a study of unsustainable development. Students, particularly those whose personal inclination was to see environmental capital as pre-eminent had to learn to reason that the system is a three-legged stool: if one leg fails, the stool falls. Environmental failure can bring the system down, and often does because it is so poorly managed, but so can economic or social failure associated with an engineering project e ‘the only environmental lead killing
948
D.J. Fisk, A. Ahearn / Journal of Cleaner Production 14 (2006) 946e951
elephants is in poacher’s bullets’. A case study of the financial failure of a museum that had been devoted to teaching children the principles of sustainable development was used to ram home the point. 2.6. Mapping onto design and operation as a process To meet the students’ appetite for tools they could apply, we mapped these conceptual arguments onto a three-stage model of an engineering project (taken from the Royal Academy of Engineering [3]). The RAEng Design Group identified the three stages of progress through a project as 1. Need e Scoping 2. Vision e Design 3. Delivery e Implementation We then mapped different available tools for sustainable development onto the different stages, adding a post design stage ‘use’. The literature is relatively rich on early stage tools. For example, ‘scoping tools’, such as sustainable development indicator sets, are taken as applied to the vision stage. Tools such as life cycle analysis are taken as applied to the design stage. Tools such as real options’ analysis are taken as applying to implementation. 3. The problem One conceptualisation of the UK-Spec engineers’ registration requirement could be a world in which the environmental/ social/economic key outcomes were accurately balanced by a client brief which took into account specific legislative requirements directed to ensure sustainable development. In this world the learning objective would be to develop a skill (again to quote UK-Spec) to realise such a brief by ‘use of imagination, creativity and innovation’, relevant to the student’s respective engineering discipline. Scoping tools, such as sustainable development indicators, would be a means to strip out the essential elements in the brief. While such a conceptualisation has its place, especially for exemplar engineering projects, it is hard to argue that this is the world in which most projects experienced by postgraduates will exist. In reality, the engineer in the 21st century will have to take an active, not passive, part in balancing these outcomes. This was emphasized by what many commentators viewed as the mixed outcome of the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD). Had the course followed on from the 1992 World Summit on Environment and Development, it would have been natural to have been based on implementing a ‘client brief’ drawn from Agenda 21 [4] and the new international legal instruments. No such legitimised outcome was associated with the ‘Jo’burg Summit’. Indeed, the diplomatic sessions were generally viewed as overshadowed by the civil society sessions (e.g. ENDS [5]) and so-called Type II actions. Here engineers played a significant part, not only in proposing solutions but scoping agendas. For example, the ‘Toronto Declaration’ by global mining companies represented one such
initiative (Minerals Mining and Sustainable Development [6]), which would have been inconceivable a few years before. All this requires skills which are not taught on a conventional technology-focussed engineering course. The question for the new module was how to teach skills in analysing problems that had strong and complex social dimensions, in a relatively short window of time. Teaching postgraduate engineers a working knowledge of the techniques and skills is a challenge, even more so because the sustainability module is only 20% of their taught Masters course: the other 80% is classic, specialist engineering. As teachers, we could not rely on deep immersion in a single discipline to impart the mindset required for the understanding of sustainable development now required by engineering registration requirements. An obvious problem when drawing students onto an optional module from seven core courses is that the selection and admission of students is based on their suitability for the main core course. Therefore, whilst entry criteria for the straight core course are controlled, it is diverse for sustainability and no prerequisites can be set. The module was not promoted as a soft option, rather the reverse, with very challenging coursework, but also the promise of dealing with real world problems in all their complexity. As an example, one of the most popular components of the course in the student evaluation was a ‘wicked problem’ case study of infrastructure development in the perplexingly troubled context of Sandoval (based on Ref. [19]). The design of the sustainable development module therefore had to presume that students, while having the strong motivation characteristic of an elective module, would have little or no background in the subject, and little or no background in the learning strategies, skills and techniques needed for analysing real-life situations. Therefore the teaching method, as well as content, of the module had to be thought out. However, the project scoping stage presented a challenge because to create and use some of these indicators students needed to extract non-numerical information about complex economic and social systems. Bearing in mind that the student intake by definition favours those with strong engineering scientific academic qualifications, there was every reason to assume that critical evaluation and analysis using social science methods applied to textual source material would be problematic. The first step towards a solution was to clearly delineate the problem. We assumed that while engineering students may have special skills compared with their peers in understanding complex diagrammatic representations of systems, they may not have similar skills in comprehending complex economic and social relationships when the source material was expressed ‘linearly’ as text. A sample of our own engineering textbooks revealed that around 30e50% of page space was devoted to diagrammatic or symbolic material. This contrasts with a comparable sample of textbooks for legal students, which had less than 5% of non-text space, despite the implicit logical structure that underlies legal codes. Much of the available material on the economic and social aspects of sustainable development
D.J. Fisk, A. Ahearn / Journal of Cleaner Production 14 (2006) 946e951
is in the latter form. We wanted to give students confidence in analysing threats to sustainable development, to the point at which they were able to challenge clients and project definitions. For the most able student, our intended outcome was an ability to use analysis to appraise options and even create systems dynamics models of real situations that could be brought to the dialogue with stakeholders. We conjecture that problems encountered by engineering students with the concept of sustainability, reported elsewhere (Carew and Mitchell [7]), may in part be caused by this difficulty of transferring ideas from one format to another. Our problem was to find a means of helping students bridge the social science gap in a short time. The solution reported here draws on a technique developed by fieldwork sociologists, the cognitive map. 4. Using cognitive mapping The cognitive map hypothesis supposes that individuals or groups approach new problems with a set of assumptions about causal relationships already in place. Further it claims that this map of relationships is used to make sense of the new problem. Sociologists have a strong research interest in eliciting this map and have identified a number of tools for fieldwork. There is a wide range of related techniques. We decided on the simple cognitive map, as described by Ackerman et al. [8] for three reasons. First, it is suitable for building a map of an issue that can be created and shared by a group (e.g. Shaw et al. [9]). It therefore has an added value to the student as a potential tool for stakeholder engagement. Second, it has been successfully used as a basis for Operations Research modelling and so offered promise that it would work with engineering students. Third, software is available to support rapid modification and development of maps (e.g. Ref. [10]). The software only organises the topology of the map, but
949
this saves considerable time over, say, a non-interactive white board or post-it notes and removes any inhibition against totally redrawing a partially completed complex map. Our adaptation of the cognitive map process was to convert it from an interview tool to a textual analysis tool. The steps are as follows: 1. Identify the individual ideas in a piece of text and extract as box elements. 2. Create causal links between them as implied by the text. 3. Review the resultant map to remove redundancy. 4. Re-arrange the map to give structural emphasis. 5. Test the map’s interpretative power for interventions. As an illustration of the technique the part of the Introduction section has been mapped at Fig. 1, which shows the result at step 4. The map has been grouped so that the external world, teaching resource and student skills cluster. An interpretation is that it is the prevalence of bad practice that pushes the course towards this approach. These deceptively simple steps need considerable practice. From an educational theory point of view the use of cognitive mapping accords with a constructivist learning theory. That is, individuals and groups take new information and construct meaning from it, in light of what they already know. A difficulty with cognitive mapping is that ‘what we already know’ can impede the ability to map effectively: this is well known within constructivist learning theory. Shifting a learner’s assumptions will not happen automatically with the acquisition of new information: the learner may need to be helped to see that their prior ideas, beliefs, habits or assumptions need to be recognised and challenged. This will be seen in the description of our experience of teaching cognitive mapping to our students.
‘good practice’ inspires, ‘bad practice’ abounds, earlier stages teaching material on sustainable development lacks frontline reality. maturity and experience of postgraduate student use a constructivist learning model Postgraduate more likely to have been exposed to full picture,
student’s personal opportunity cost can be high
less patience with woolly ideas
strong motivation to get to practical tools.
Fig. 1. Example of a simple cognitive map created from the Introduction.
Teach cognitive mapping
950
D.J. Fisk, A. Ahearn / Journal of Cleaner Production 14 (2006) 946e951
In the first session students were given a piece of text from UNEP’s Global Environmental Outlook 3 [11] presented to the WSSD that explained the social and economic pressures behind the spread of HIV in Africa. This was not such a remote problem for practical engineering as might first appear. In some parts of the world HIV and workers’ health are predominant concerns of engineers managing minerals extraction [6]. Students correctly identified the ideas contained in the passage but characteristically stumbled at two points. A common problem was a failure to realise that they had imported ideas from their own internal cognitive maps as well as from the set text. A second and related difficulty was avoiding drawing maps in which everything ended up dependent on everything else. The problem here was lack of practice in distinguishing between primary causes and secondary influences and associations. The teaching approach was to focus on the links as causal propositions that needed to be defended, allowing only the material provided by the text as evidence. This experience flags the point that engineering students studying sustainable development may well find problems with assessing dispassionately social and economic evidence unless they receive special training. While passion is to be commended it can easily interfere with all the key principles of involving stakeholders. There was a notable shift in student capability after three exercises. Early stages in the learning process involved producing a defensible map (few samples of text of any length are so definitive that they lead to a unique map). Once this stage was mastered the student was able to turn to what the map should visually ‘say’ when viewed as a holistic diagram. For example, students were asked to analyse a newspaper report on the disposal of the Clemenceau aircraft carrier [18]. The story is a good example of real world complexity engulfing an engineering problem. The ship had been sold for recycling as scrap, but, because of a large asbestos burden, a specialist contractor had been employed. The article reported that the ship had slipped past satellite tracking by the French authorities, and had been sighted heading for a Third World port where costs and environmental standards were much lower. Amongst other threads in the article was reference to the ambiguous status under international maritime law of ships at sea bound for scrap. A cognitive map of a newspaper article can be difficult to assemble because ideas in a Press report are often organised in a tree of descending impact to facilitate editing into available space and skim reading. The students were asked to map the article and then propose a technical solution to avoid such problems. The well-organised maps picked up a small reference to poor enforcement of some maritime regulations as the central causal feature from which most of the narrative flowed. Topologically reconfigured, this became the organising feature of the map. Students who got to this stage suffered a conversion from using the map as simply a 1-1 mapping tool, to an insight in the underlying processes that straight reading might have missed. As a consequence, in proposing their solution, they were alert to the likely failure of a simple technical solution (e.g. a register of asbestos content), and the importance of a proposal that would address the performance of the
regulators as well as the regulated. In post course evaluation students ranked the map sessions highly. Indeed students on other more conventional modules were reported as fascinated as to what their colleagues were discovering through the technique. Similar positive reaction to the use of cognitive maps has been reported on another postgraduate course with which one of the authors is associated [14]. 5. Moving to systems dynamics A cognitive map once completed has another advantage in teaching sustainable development. The Imperial course, like many others, is based upon an approach to sustainable development that requires simultaneous management of environmental, social and economic assets and not just flows e designing in the fourth dimension. Ideally all three assets should grow with time, though in practice some elements of each asset may be irreversibly converted to another and the issue is then whether the conversion is justified and retains overall sustainability. A map easily exposes ideas that work as ‘stocks’ (i.e. ‘substantive elements’ that are carried over from one time period to another). In engineering terms ‘stocks’ are the state variables of the system. If the stocks have been correctly identified, their value at one point in time should enable the model to estimate their future values. Changes in stocks between one time interval and the next represent the ‘flows’ (i.e. changes to those stocks through conversion, consumption and investment). The remainder of the map yields the ‘relationships’ that define the immediate flows in terms of current stocks values. So a cognitive map of a problem provides a convenient conversion of text to the state space formalism (where stocks are the state variables and flows their rate of change) used in systems dynamics. Indeed the original Limits to Growth World Model [12] might be viewed as a rather untidy cognitive map with eight state variables. Even the fragment of narrative presented in Fig. 1 is suggestive of stocks reflecting the state of the world, the incoming knowledge of students and the teaching resource. As a final component of this arm of the course, we encouraged students to represent their ideas in a systems dynamics format. Forrester argued almost 30 years ago that social science failed to give adequate priority to social dynamics and too much emphasis on snapshots [13]. An inhibition to using systems dynamics in the past is that the technique appears to need specialist simulation software. Some simple points can be made in class using normal spreadsheet software, but this has limitations. Using each column to represent a new time period requires the model’s formula to be repeated in every row and so provides an unhealthy pressure to simplify the model. Worse the use of columns to represent time periods in practice leads to coarse time intervals that can introduce spurious instability in the dynamics. We elected instead to use the spreadsheet to give a full annotated (and drawing enhanced) description of how the state variables were related to their values at the next time increment according to the cognitive map model. When the model was built the cells that contained the ‘previous’ values of the state variables were put equal to
D.J. Fisk, A. Ahearn / Journal of Cleaner Production 14 (2006) 946e951
the appropriate cell containing their ‘next’ values. If the facility to ‘iterate’ is checked in the Tools Menu, this assignment results in the spreadsheet cycling the chosen number of iterations, and so stepping through the model’s time history before the student’s eyes. The only restriction for students to remember is that the cycling moves through the spreadsheet row by row. To avoid using a cell value that has not been updated the casual flow of the model needs to be down the spreadsheet not along the rows. It is a sobering reflection on the growth in computing power that Forrester’s World Model I can be written on a single screen fully documented with comments and flow paths and can simulate a 1000 years in a few seconds. One of the great advantages of a systems dynamics formulation is that it concurs with the student’s perceptions of dynamical modelling, at the same time forcing recognition of qualitative components of a problem. 6. The learning outcomes The learning outcomes for this particular aspect of sustainability appear to have been met from an evaluation by teachers whilst dealing with the students in the classroom using the software. That is, the significant improvement in students’ abilities to construct meaningful maps was apparent even without formal assessment. However, formal assessment has been designed to test the students’ learning outcomes for perceived usefulness and learning gain. The evaluation process has included written questionnaires but also informal conversations with students after lectures and between lectures. Discussion amongst the teaching team reveals good satisfaction with the students’ grasp of alien, complex ideas in a short space of time. By the end of this section, students had confidence that they could unravel a complex piece of textual information so as to be able to propose a technological intervention that took account of social and economic factors. They fulfilled Bruner’s constructivist criteria that recognise good learning when students can simplify, generate new propositions and increase the manipulation of information [16]. Team leader’s self-reflection has yielded ideas for refinements next year (principally that a systems dynamic experiment could be introduced earlier) but sufficient satisfaction to allow the module to remain substantially unchanged for the second iteration. The teaching method may be refined with the acquisition of licenses for a virtual learning environment but this is not absolutely necessary and would depend on finding learning technologist support to create a system with any significant advantage over current provision. 7. Conclusion We have seen that the new engineering for sustainable development at Imperial College London faced problems of not only selecting content for a brief but high level introduction to
951
the issue, but also problems of facilitating the acquirement of a different mindset from that which they would use normally in the rest of the learners’ specialist advanced engineering studies. The design of lectures to demonstrate the four stage model of process/product engineering, namely scoping, design, implementation and use, provided a useful framework for selecting the content of the syllabus but presented a pedagogical problem of how to teach ‘‘scoping’’. The only solution to helping students grapple with the social science analysis required for the ‘‘scoping’’ process was to provide them supported learning on cognitive mapping using software that made it feasible for the students to change and refine their ideas as they constructed the maps. The fact that such software is an underappreciated component of most standard software packages meant that there were no resource constraints against this form of e-learning. With the software for cognitive mapping, students could adopt a self-evaluative and self-corrective approach. This allowed significant development in the students’ skills to be seen in only 3 weeks worth of lectures and emphasized that cross-disciplinary studies over the science/social science boundaries are feasible even in specialist scientific institutions. This has been confirmed by successive student evaluations where this component of the module consistently scored highly for interest and usefulness.
References [1] WFEO engineering education and training for sustainable development conference, Paris; 1997. [2] UK-Spec engineering council; 2004. [3] Royal Academy of Engineering design principles; 2002. [4] UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Agenda 21; 1992. [5] ENDS Report 332; Sep 2002. [6] MMSD breaking new ground. Earthscan; 2002. [7] Carew AL, Mitchell CA. Characterizing undergraduate engineering students’ understanding of sustainability. Eur J Eng Educ 2002;27(4): 349e61. [8] Ackerman F, Eden C, Cropper S. Cognitive mapping: a user’s guide, Working paper 90/2, University of Strathclyde Management Science; 1992. [9] Shaw D, Ackerman F, Eden C. Approaches to sharing knowledge in group problem solving. J Oper Res Soc 2003;54:936e48. [10] Decision explorer. www.banxia.com. [11] Global Environmental Outlook 3, UNEP. Earthscan; 2002. [12] Meadows D. Limits to growth. Earthscan; 1972. [13] Forester J. Industrial dynamics. MIT Press; 1968. [14] Fenner R. Private communication centre for sustainable development. University of Cambridge. [15] Ahearn AL. Words fail us: the pragmatic need for rhetoric in engineering communication. Global J Eng Educ 1998. [16] Bruner J. Toward a theory of instruction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 1966. [17] UK government sustainable development strategy. Cmd 6467 TSO London; 2005. [18] Financial Times. High environmental costs spell trouble on high seas; Nov 5, 2003. [19] Rose WI, Bommer JJ, Sandoval CA. Natural hazards and risk mitigation in El Salvador. Geol Soc Am Spec Pap 2004;375:1e4.