Educating the Sustainable Built Environment Professional – Facing the Challenge
Educating the Sustainable Built Environment Professional – Facing the Challenge
Dr Sarath Mataraarachchi, Ms Sunanda Peri, Mr Liam Apter
The terms sustainability and sustainable development are used in conversations, writings, and government programmes more than ever. However, most cannot explain what it is if they were asked to do so. Sustainable development is all-encompassing and not limited to one discipline, location, or community. There are definitions, but they don’ t provide a meaningful explanation of the concept— the difficulty of defining sustainability and making someone feel it is an issue for teachers of sustainability. Sustainability interconnects with everything we do and everything that happens around us. Interconnectivity essentially varies from place to place, activity to activity, and event to event. Classroom teaching and hypothetical projects are limited to known scenarios. Sustainability is related to some known and many unknown conditions and scenarios that are interdependent and interconnected. In educating the sustainable built environment professional, teachers face the challenge of creating conditions for the students to know, respond, and be innovative in responding to a myriad of situations that emerge in the built environment. To face this challenge, we have moved away from hypotheticals and created real-life opportunities for students to feel and experience sustainability rather than being taught through classroom exercises. We have created these opportunities by taking on the challenges faced by industry partners creating sustainable built environments. A significant part of the courses is devoted to real-life practical engagements to encourage spontaneity, insightful and critical thinking, and genuine reflection. Experience during the last few years demonstrated that real-life projects only offered opportunities to educate the professional. However, the quality of engagement between the industry and the course, students and class instructors, amongst students themselves, and the space for students to use their imagination determined the effectiveness of the knowledge creation and sharing to educate an effective professional.
22