scholarly journals Educating engineers for/in sustainable development? What we knew, what we learned, and what we should learn

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 625-639 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karel Mulder ◽  
Jordi Segalas-Coral ◽  
Didac Ferrer-Balas
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Engineering Education ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Project Based Learning ◽  
Academic Context ◽  
The Past ◽  
External Stakeholders ◽  
Development Engineering ◽  
Normative Content

In the past decade, several engineering universities, mainly in Europe, but also in Australia, North America, and Japan, have been addressing the issue of sustainable development. Engineering education in sustainable development has been discussed at many occasions. What questions have been addressed, what answers have been provided, and what are the main remaining topics for research into engineering education in sustainable development? What should engineers learn regarding sustainable development? How to trigger institutional change within engineering schools: top-down or bottom-up? How to trigger cultural change, how to win the hearts and souls of the faculty? Curriculum change: starting new programs or changing existing ones? The contribution of active learning and project based learning? The role of external stakeholders, external cooperation? How to measure sustainable development learning effects? Practice what you preach: how to green the campus, diminish resource consumption and sustainabilise procurement? How to teach normative content in an academic context? The paper, based mainly on the European literature on EESD of the last decade, discusses the answers that were provided and present an agenda for further research in EESD (This paper has mainly a European perspective. An overview of sustainable development engineering education in the U

scholarly journals Taking Lead for Sustainability: Environmental Managers as Institutional Entrepreneurs

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 4022
Author(s):  
Pernilla Gluch ◽  
Stina Månsson
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Phenomenological Study ◽  
Organizational Structures ◽  
Critical Events ◽  
Institutional Entrepreneurship ◽  
Institutional Practices ◽  
Institutional Entrepreneurs ◽  
The Past

Over the past two decades, sustainability professionals have entered the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. However, little attention has been given to the actual professionalization processes of these and the leadership conducted by them when shaping the pace and direction for sustainable development. With the aim to explore how the role of sustainability professionals develops, critical events affecting everyday sustainability work practices were identified. Based on a phenomenological study with focus on eight experienced environmental managers’ life stories, and by applying the theoretical lens of institutional entrepreneurship, the study displays a professionalization process in six episodes. Different critical events both enabled and disabled environmental managers’ opportunity to engage in institutional entrepreneurship. The findings indicate how agency is closely interrelated to temporary discourses in society; they either serve to support change and create new institutional practices towards enhanced sustainability or disrupt change when agency to act is temporarily “lost”. To manage a continually changing environment, environmental managers adopt different strategies depending on the situated context and time, such as finding ambassadors and interorganizational allies, mobilizing resources, creating organizational structures, and repositioning themselves.

Struggling with the Past: Women's Theatre in Search of a History

1989 ◽  
Vol 5 (18) ◽  
pp. 107-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Bassnett
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
The Past ◽  
Feminist Study ◽  
Introductory Article ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
The University

Theatre scholarship is only just beginning to respond to the insights and emphases suggested by feminist criticism. In this introductory article to what we intend to be a strong and continuing thread in NTQ, Susan Bassnett outlines the resulting problems, and explores the historical context and conditions in terms of one central issue – the role of women as performers (and non-performers) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She also examines some of the wider implications for theatre studies, affected as these also are by new historicist approaches to the study of cultural change. Susan Bassnett teaches in the Graduate School of Comparative Literary Theory in the University of Warwick, and has been a regular contributor to New Theatre Quarterly and other journals, notably in the field of Italian theatre. Her most recent books include a feminist study of Elizabeth I, and (in collaboration with John Stokes and Michael Booth) Bernhardt. Terry, Duse: the Actress in Her Time.

How to Turn History into Scenario

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Lane
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Moral Good ◽  
The Past ◽  
Normative Content ◽  
Normative Account

In this chapter, Lane argues that Plato in Republic Book 8 emancipates the logic of social change from the past while infusing it with normative content. From this perspective, Plato might be said to invent a logic of intelligible choice to explain social change in the form of an explanatory scenario rather than history. Whereas Herodotus and Thucydides investigated the record of observable social changes in the past and present, Plato undertakes a new intellectual enterprise: an exploration of the mechanisms of social change that is not merely adduced from the happenstance character of those events that have actually occurred. Furthermore, what Plato offers is a form of sociopolitical explanation that is premised on a normative account of the objective moral good, centered on the role of law as a principle of order oriented to the good, and on rule as essentially aiming to serve the good of the ruled.

Promoting the Use of Technical Standards Inindustry-Oriented Engineering Education

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 24-32
Author(s):  
Oscar Bonastre ◽  
Alejandro Bia
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
Engineering Education ◽  
Learning Experience ◽  
Technical Standards ◽  
Professional Activities ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Right ◽  
Correct Understanding

The role of technical standards (TS) has become increasingly important for engineering over the past years. Nowadays, undergraduates are not only our future colleagues in industry and academia, but they also constitute the future workforce of a very significant part of the industry. The accomplishments of professional activities require a correct understanding of the role of technical standards applied to the industry, especially within the computing and the telecommunications fields. One of the challenges is to find the right way to introduce technical standards to enhance the learning experience by pointing students to the best practices of the industry. We found a stimulating alternative to overcome this challenge through the IEEE Student Branch Program. This paper presents one case of success, the IEEE's Student Branch in Spain during 2014, 2015 and 2017 and the Exemplary Student Branch Award (2017 to 2019) of Region 8 (Europe, Middle East and Africa).

The urbanisation of African music: some theoretical observations

Popular Music ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 113-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Coplan
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
African Music ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
South Africans ◽  
The Past ◽  
Urban Music ◽  
Black South Africans ◽  
Urban Conditions ◽  
Musical Change

Interest in the processes of change involved in the transformation of rural African recreational music into popular music under urban conditions has grown substantially over the past decade (see Nettl 1978; Mukuna 1980). This interest has largely focused on two complementary problem areas: what such change can tell us about the principles and dynamics of musical development, and what processes of musical change may reveal about human behaviour (see Rycroft 1977, pp. 216–17) and the role of musical expression in social reorganisation. If the study of the urban music of modern Africa is to advance our knowledge in these areas, we must formulate ‘a conceptual framework in which changes and retentions of musical style and context can be understood within a synthesis of social and cultural change’ (Szwed 1970, p. 220). The results of my research into the past three centuries of urban musical change among black South Africans have suggested some tentative steps toward constructing such a framework (see Coplan 1980A).

Maiakovskii and the Mobile Monument: Alternatives to Iconoclasm in Russian Culture

Slavic Review ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 766-791 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Rann
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Soviet Power ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
The Way

This article examines Vladimir Maiakovskii's frequent references to statues and monuments in his poetry in relation to traditions of iconoclasm in Russian culture in order not only to shed light on the poet's attitude toward the role of the past in the creation of a new culture but also to investigate the way in which the destruction, relocation, and transformation of monuments, both in the urban landscape and in art, reflects political change in Russia. James Rann demonstrates that, while Maiakovskii often invoked a binary iconoclastic discourse in which creation necessitates destruction, his poetry also articulated a more nuanced vision of cultural change through the symbol of the moving monument: the statue is preserved but also transformed and liberated. Finally, an analysis of “Vo ves' golos” shows how Maiakovskii's myth of the statue helped him articulate his relationship to Soviet power and to his own poetic legacy.

scholarly journals Systemic Education and Awareness: the role of project-based-learning in the systemic view.

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Dominici ◽  
Pier Paolo Peruccio
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Project Based Learning ◽  
Team Work ◽  
Actual System ◽  
Continuous Growth ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Systemic View ◽  
The Way

Through the critical analysis of some case studies, this paper intends to investigate different tools useful to the ecological education,to analyse didactic activities which have more influence in the development of an individual and collective awareness and which of them can get closer students to the systemic approach. The systemic design is one of many actors that takes place inside a well-structured social network that presents always more frequently complex problems, which are difficult to solve by the application of linear approach. Always more it's clear that the way applied by the actual system to solve problems around not only ecological area, but also economic and cultural, it's not enough to answer to real needs. It's necessary a change of paradigm, from an approach based on the competition and on the logic of continuous growth, to a systemic vision, based on the collaboration, on the awareness and on the rediscovery of qualitative values. The ecological emergency demands more and more the development of sustainable and resilient communities; for this reason we have to change the way of thinking processes and relations, in other words we have to become ecoliterate: we have to be able to understand the organizational principles of ecosystems and the way of manage complexity. So ecoliteracy represent the starting point of innovative processes: it gives importance to the relations and to the multidisciplinary team-work. It's clear that next to the cultural change we have to rearrange the schooling system which now represents the official institution appointed of knowledge communication. The current academic system has been defined by the same linear and competitive approach used to delineate our economic systems, in this way, inside its structure, it usually reproduces the same social hierarchy and inequality that we can observe in our society. In practice, to achieve some important changes, it is necessary to extend precepts of systemic view to a huge group of people (starting from students of primary school to college students and over). Others two key points are the discussion around the strict hierarchy between teacher and student and the support of collaborative behaviour. Different experiences, academic and not, are compared, considering actors involved, activities, team-working and final outcome. For this reason the role of project-based-learning and practical academic activities is considered inside an education whose aim is to train people eco-competent and who are able to enhance their active role available to the community.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/IFDP.2016.3712

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