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EVALUATION REPORT 2015
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Name of course
: Environmental Sustainability
Identified Threshold C cept
: Thinking sustainably
Knowledge
Requisite Skills
Values
Climate
Emissions
calculation &
measurement
Environmental
and planetary
awareness
Materials
Production cost
analysis
Health
Emissions
Sustainable design
Wellbeing of
future generations
Teaching
method(s)
Design studio, independent student enquiry, emissions
analysis workshops
Assessment
method(s)
Production of a costed sustainable design, to include a
theoretical rationale
ous paradox that attempting to prepare students to address
a world of uncertainty, complexity and risk is not best served
by introducing a new kind of certainty into the programme
through rigidly defined learning outcomes. It should be pos-
sible to articulate a distinctive pedagogy in such ways as to
define the sorts of architectural challenges and the nature of
the learning episodes that students will be required to en-
counter within the programme, without having to predict in
detail the outcomes of such encounters for individual groups
of students, and to systematise them. The encounters and
learning thresholds can be consistent, the individualised
outcomes do not have to be.
What will remain important will be to ensure a balanced
and coherent range of pedagogies and teaching methods
through the programmes overall. Imaginative encounters
with risk and encountering the unknown need to be bal-
anced against the acquisition of necessary technical skill
and professional ‘know-how’. Making is thinking does not
of course imply that students end up unable to articulate,
communicate and evaluate their thinking.
Challenges for the leadership
There is a human resource issue in that it became clear in
conversations that are insufficient, suitably qualified and
well prepared staff to undertake all the teaching options that
are required. However good the course design becomes,
it needs to be implemented by staff who understand the
principles behind the design and who are motivated and
sufficiently well informed to implement the design.
There appear to be a focused, committed and enthusiastic
core of staff, mainly programme and course leaders, and
principally focused around the TRANSark project group, who
share a common vision of a new pedagogical approach. This
approach needs to be more clearly and emphatically artic-
ulated so that it can be communicated and shared with the
wider core of teaching staff (many of whom are part-time or
casual contributors), in order to bring them into the direction
of travel of the transformational learning that is envisaged
for the School.
Each course might produce an operational matrix to integrate these pedagogical factors, eg: