Contextualising capabilities for public safety in undergraduate sustainability engineering education

Abstract

Sustainability in university curricula remains important for equipping graduates from all disciplines with capabilities to respond to complex social, economic, and environmental challenges in their future professional roles. Situating sustainability learning within disciplinary contexts is needed for learners to apply sustainability theory to their future professions. Furthermore, developing capabilities is important to enable graduates to act in differing professional contexts. In response to these needs, this paper contextualises safety as part of sustainability in undergraduate engineering studies by exploring the complementarity between professional capabilities for safety in engineering and key capabilities found in sustainability education literature. The paper draws on findings from interviews with 41 pipeline engineers undertaken to build an understanding of differing views on engineering capabilities necessary for safety decision making. The results show synergies between safety and sustainability capabilities in the context of engineering practice and the opportunities to contextualise safety within sustainability in engineering education. From a safety perspective, given the expanding sustainable development agenda, there is an opportunity to increase education for public safety in engineering curricula within the scope of sustainability education and to shift learning from competencies to capabilities-based outcomes.

Keywords:

• Engineering curriculum
• sustainability
• competence
• capability
• public safety

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In European education literature, recent studies tend to focus on extending the definition of competence to include aspects of capability, rather than seeing these as different things. Whilst definitions vary due to complex and multidisciplinary fields contributing to sustainability education discourse in different languages (Shephard, Rieckmann, and Barth 2019), the acceptance of a need to broaden graduate and professional education is a common theme.

Additional information

Funding

This work is funded by the Future Fuels CRC, supported through the Australian Government’s Cooperative Research Centres Program. The cash and in-kind support from the industry participants is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes on contributors

Orana Sandri

Dr Orana Sandri is a senior research fellow at the School of Property, Construction and Project Management, RMIT University. Her recent research activities focus on skills training and learning to support the transition to clean energy, particularly hydrogen, and analysis of low carbon planning, built environment and energy policy in Australia. For the past decade, Orana’s research has focused on adult learning in sustainability education, including good practice approaches to develop and assess sustainability capabilities in higher education.

Sarah Holdsworth

Dr Sarah Holdsworth is an Associate Professor within the School of Property, Construction and Project Management at RMIT University. She conducts applied research in the built environment field with planners, construction and project managers and within higher education. Her current research includes projects on the understanding and development of skills, practices and policies for an environmentally constrained future, and devising drivers for the diffusion of sustainability in industry practice and higher education programs.

Sarah Maslen

Sarah Maslen is Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Canberra, Australia. Her research examines knowing, the senses, and the relationality of human and nonhuman actors in various fields of activity. Recent projects have addressed narrative-based reasoning in engineering, engineering ethics, medical diagnosis as sensed and digitized, and how specialized forms of hearing are shaped through social interaction.

Jan Hayes

Professor Jan Hayes is a sociologist with 35 years’ experience in safety and risk management. Her current activities cover academia, consulting and regulation. She is a Program Leader for the social science safety research activities of the Future Fuels CRC and a Board Safety Assurance Advisor for Airservices Australia. Prof Hayes is a former member of the Advisory Board of the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority. Her research interests all connect to organisational accident prevention and include professionalism, expertise, decision making and use of standards.