1 Paper accepted for Systems Thinking and Complexity Science ...

Paper accepted for Systems Thinking and Complexity Science: Insights for Action. 11th Annual ANZSYS Conference/Managing the Complex V Conference, 4-7/12/2005 Title: Copernicus and the All Blacks: Introducing Environmental Engineering students to systems approaches

Author: Don Houston, Senior Lecturer Institute of Technology and Engineering Massey University, New Zealand

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Copernicus and the All Blacks: Introducing Environmental Engineering students to systems approaches

Abstract This paper draws out issues around introducing engineering and technology students to the roles of technologists and engineers in addressing complex environmental issues. To fulfil their role in society in an ethically defensible way, technologists and engineers need to move beyond simply considering engineering solutions to environmental problems. However, much technology and engineering education remains primarily focused on problem solving. For the past two years, I have worked with students to encourage development of their thinking about environmental issues, systems and systems concepts, and inter-relationships with the work of environmental engineers. The learning opportunities shift from the known – Copernicus and science, and rugby and the All Blacks – to ‘new’ ideas. The learning moves from surfacing and exploration of the students’ common–sense understanding of ‘a system’, through exploration of systems characteristics and properties on to the use of approaches such as boundary critique to reframe ‘local’ environmental engineering problems such as the need for a new landfill for waste disposal and water supply management. Along the way students are encouraged to reflect on the variety of roles that technologists and engineers could and should play in public policy processes around environmental issues. While students are initially reluctant to deal with messy ideas, most leave the learning encounters acknowledging that ‘science is not enough’.

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Introduction Massey University through its long-standing Bachelor of Technology, and more recent Bachelor of Engineering, programs has a tradition of producing technically skilled Environmental Engineers. The graduates have a solid grounding in science and engineering design theory and practice through their four-year degree. They move into positions in industry and in local government and demonstrate good capability to deal with technical problems of waste management, which is at the centre of what Environmental Engineers do. However, there are strong threads to both the systems literature and the broader environmental management literature that argue that science provides only a partial answer to environmental issues particularly from a public policy perspective. Lant (1998:21) argues the emerging information needs of managers attempting to deal with complex social and ecological issues point to the need for ‘policy discussions that analyze the impact of social, political, economic, and technological trends … and that integrate science, policy, and management.’ Ingram and Schneider (1998) argue that public policy has four purposes that should be appropriately balanced. It has an utilitarian/technical role to solve problems efficiently and effectively drawing on the knowledge of experts including scientists. Secondly, it is a reflection of the exercise of political power between contending coalitions of interest. Thirdly, it provides the arena and subject for democratic debate in the search for the public good. Finally public policy should serve justice. There is a need to redraw the boundaries around social and technical issues. Toman (1998) calls for ‘iterative shared learning’ in the process of better connecting scientific enquiry and society. Increasingly those working at the interfaces of science and society are turning to systems concepts concepts, participatory approaches and multiple methods to address the challenges of complexity, integration, participation and improved communication in addressing issues that cut across disciplinary boundaries. Environmental policy is moving beyond the realm of reductionist hard science, to deal with increasingly complex and ‘unruly’ socio-technical problems. Scientists and technologists have been drawn into increasingly visible policy struggles and debates on scientific interpretation, as well as moral, ethical, and value based uncertainties about the applications of new technologies.

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Ingram and Schneider (1998:26) assert that science and scientists in the ‘new’ context of balanced policy need to: ‘accept their political role, and improve their negotiating skills’; ‘perform science for the powerless and under-represented’; [and] ‘exercise influence to restore balance by engaging the process of democratic deliberation’. In this view the ‘most valued expert is one who can transcend disciplinary boundaries, synthesise diverse perspective, and has a firm understanding of the political role of science in public policy.’ The role of scientist and technologists in environmental issues then becomes one of active participation in policy debate helping participants to talk across boundaries. These views are reflected in recent work undertaken in New Zealand in ‘Challenging Science’ (Dew and Fitzgerald, 2004). To fulfil their role in society in an ethically defensible way, scientists, technologists and engineers need to move beyond simply considering scientific and engineering solutions to environmental problems. However, the technology and engineering program at Massey remains primarily focused on disciplinary-based, scientific, engineering problem solving. I came as an outsider, who had grasped the systems idea, into the area of environmental management and environmental engineering with its changing boundaries, changing expectations of the role of scientists and engineers, and increasing acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the views and values of multiple stakeholders. To me the answer seemed obvious. For our students to effectively deal with the broadening spectrum of roles, they needed to embrace or at least be exposed to the potential of systemic thinking and methodologies beyond systematic technical problem solving. This paper draws out issues around my attempts to introduce third year Environmental Engineering students to the potential roles of technologists, scientists and engineers in addressing environmental issues. It is a personal account of an intervention designed to help move students’ thinking beyond science towards critical systems approaches: from problem solving to problem structuring. Copernicus, the All Blacks and water management provided the focus for coming to grips with ‘problems’. Why Systems Approaches? Introducing environmental engineering students to systems approaches seemed the right thing to do. Attwater (2000: 555) identifies the ‘need to find ways to talk across traditions….’ Systems

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approaches potentially provide the way. They make sense to me! McIntyre (2004) draws attention to Banathy’s (1996) maps of ontology and epistemology. These show three views of the world through science, the humanities and design. My own world view was shaped in the humanities [and education] with its focus on the human experience, its descriptive, evaluative and synthesising methods and its valuing of subjectivity, and concern for ‘justice’. [One might argue that those steeped in the humanities are primitive or naïve critical systems thinkers.] At the same time I had dabbled in science and been exposed to design. When I stumbled across critical systems thinking, first through Carr and Kemmis’s (1986) implicitly systemic work and later through the works of Flood, Jackson and Midgley, Critical Systems Thinking and Practice offered an approach that optimised the best of all worlds. Critical Systems Thinking is committed to the systems idea. It also is committed to critical awareness, methodological pluralism and human improvement. It seeks to break away from the problem of applying the same model to manage a problem as was behind its creation’ (Hawk 1999: 362). As Hawk (1999: 364) notes ‘An endearing and enduring aspect of the systems approach is that it encourages one to see relations and connections to a larger system of order. It encourages a more holistic stance and innovative, alternative activities.’ The local context The students in the environmental engineering course for their first two years of study are immersed in the sciences and problem solving through engineering design. Their learning experiences are structured by the worldviews of science and design. In the first semester of their third year of study they encounter their first ‘environmental specific’ paper ‘Environmental Strategies for Industry’. This paper was an attempt to provide broader context around science and engineering by exposing the students to the human [social, political and economic] and natural, ecological environments in which industry operates and environmental engineers work. The aim of the paper is to ‘examine the interfaces of industrial activity, the natural environment, human attitudes and how the industrial-environment boundary may be managed to benefit industry, the environment and modern society.’ The paper includes a two-week long topic on ‘systems’. Before

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my involvement, the topic had been presented as a self-contained series of lectures on systems concepts supported by readings and assessed through a systems modelling assignment independent of the rest of the paper. Students quite rationally became adept at using the modelling software because that part of the topic was assessed. In 2004 as a consequence of staff changes, I was invited to teach the topic because I taught another paper wit the word ‘systems’ in its title! What we did The ‘systems’ topic was restructured from a process of delivery of information about systems and practising modelling to exploration through guided questions about systems. I carefully sequenced the questions to start from the students’ known. The learning opportunities focused on drawing out and formalizing the students’ intuitive understanding. The process and content of the interactions in the topic are outlined below. Each part was structured around key framing questions to prompt discussion and exploration of topics [identified in square brackets] and concluded with consolidation of the ideas, generated through discussion, and positioning the students’ ideas in the structured context of systems thinking. At the end of each part students were provided with a selected reading to assist their own consolidation of ideas. My previous involvement in two projects - one developing a student resource (Daellenbach and Flood, 2002), the other a local systemic intervention (Baker et al., 2004) – provided access to resources to support the learning experiences. Part 1: What is a ‘systems’? [Systems concepts and properties] What do you understand by the term ‘a system’? What are examples of ‘systems’ that you are familiar with? The students with a little prompting produced an extensive list of examples of everyday uses of the ‘systems’ label: for example - the exhaust system of a car, a sound system, a computer system, the education system, the solar system, etc. We then moved to explore: What do these ‘systems’ have in common? What makes a ‘system’ a ‘system’? Are they, in fact, all systems? Students were able, through group discussion, to build up a map of common systems characteristics

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and properties of: elements, relationships, sub-groups and sub-systems, purposefulness, emergence, boundaries and environment, and transformation. What differences are there between types of systems? The groups were quite quickly able to distinguish between ‘hard’ natural, physical systems and ‘soft’ human activity systems. As we completed this part of the topic, the students were given Daellenbach (2002) as a distillation of key ideas. The next part of the topic moved into exploration of relationships between hard and interpretive systems and the importance of the boundary concept. Copernicus came to centre stage, followed by the All Blacks. Part 2: What did Copernicus do? [Relationships within systems are important] After considerable discussion and some research the students concluded that he redefined the agreed nature of the planetary system – from centred on the Earth, to centered around the Sun, by reconsidering the relationships between the elements of the system. More generally if you redefine the relationships between elements of a system, you redefine the system. Part 3: What are the All Blacks? [The importance and potential impact of boundaries as human constructs] Everybody in New Zealand knows [and many revere] the All Blacks, consequently all the students know them. The All Blacks are a sports team, but not just any sports team: they are the National rugby [union] team. The team is a national icon: a representation of the best aspects of New Zealand culture and national identity. They are the most recognized and marketable brand in international Rugby, which is a big business. What can happen if people see the All Blacks [a system] in different ways? With different bounding environments? In the explanation above, the All Blacks as a system are framed by at least four environments – the New Zealand nation, the international [sporting] community, the sport of rugby, the sports entertainment market. These images of the All Blacks reflecting different values have come into public conflict. In 1981, the whole of New Zealand was affected and divided by a clash of ethics and values with the All Blacks at its centre. The South African rugby teams toured New Zealand

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for a series of international matches against them. The tour and the teams became the focus of mounting opposition to the apartheid regime in South Africa. Violent confrontations and clashes occurred: the nation was divided by opposing views of the All Blacks as ‘only a [non-political] sports team – let’s just get on with the game’ and of the All Blacks as a representation of New Zealand’s social and political values and consciousness. Secondly, in the late 1990s a strong public outcry occurred when, the rights to ‘live’ telecasts of All Blacks’, previously broadcast on public free-to-air television, were sold to New Zealand’s pay television network. The All Blacks as saleable brand came into conflict with the All Blacks as national icon: free-to-air coverage of their matches was seen as a national right. Discussion around these two events, one of which significantly influenced New Zealand society, brought home to students the nature and importance of the boundary concepts, the connections between boundaries and values and the utility of boundary critique. Midgley (2002) and Ulrich (2002) were provided to help formalize their thinking about issues around boundaries. Part 4: What has any of this to do with environmental engineering? Should we care? [Using systems ideas and approaches] Having started with science then society, the learning opportunities then moved to focus on application to environmental issues predominantly through structured case studies. What should be the role of scientists and engineers in addressing environmental issues? At this point, we reverted briefly to lectures. I introduced the students to the ideas of Lant, Ingram and Schneider, and others outlined earlier in this paper – that engineers need to move beyond science to engage with environmental ‘problems’ and that their role should extend beyond problem solving to problem structuring, communication and facilitation. Fitzgerald and Dew’s (2004) ‘Introduction: The challenges of challenging science’ was supplied to the students the second time the topic was offered: it unfortunately was still in press the first time through. How can these roles be played out? Previously I had been involved peripherally with a community intervention around local water resource issues (Baker et al., 2004). That work proved to be a valuable resource to help students

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walk their way through an application of systemic interventions to a local ‘environmental’ problem with social, quality of life, economic and political, as well as technological, dimensions. Students were introduced to the general problem context and then guided through the process used in the intervention. For some parts of the process, the students took on and role-played the value positions of various participants, e.g. permanent residents, non-resident rate payers, local council members, council employees and the business community. The students were guided through the tools used in community workshops – such as rich pictures – and those used by the facilitators to structure and guide the overall intervention – such as boundary critique which helped to restructure the ‘problem’ that the community was grappling with. Interestingly, but unsurprisingly, the ‘solutions’ proposed by the students differed somewhat from the actual intervention. Once the students had had the opportunity to walk through the scenario, they were provided with Baker et al. (2004) to illustrate the actual intervention. We have a problem! Our local landfill is nearly full, so what should we do? When confronted with the ‘landfill is nearly full’ as the focal problem, the scientific, engineering solution leaps to the fore: Construct another landfill! When the boundaries are shifted so that ‘community solid waste disposal’ is the issue and the need for new landfill becomes a symptom, then the range of interests relating to the issue widens as does the range of possible interventions towards solutions. With one of the two groups, which included an overseas student with experience of how these issues had been the addressed in Europe, the boundaries were drawn wider and wider until the idea of focusing on systems that could be influenced was introduced, then the students rather than continuing to sweep in possible interests began to re-focus in to a more local perspective where influence could be exerted. The students then focused on the potential offered by the ‘green’ concepts of ‘reduce, re-use, and recycle’ and methods such as high temperature incineration as complementary strategies to reduce local reliance on landfill. Part 5: What should Environmental Engineers do? In the last part of the topic, we returned to open discussion about potential roles for Environmental Engineers in addressing environmental issues. The students indicated that their thinking had

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changed and that they recognized the breadth of potential roles they could play, and that there are boundaries to the potential contribution of science to resolving environmental problems and issues. Science and engineering design needed to be complemented by thinking about people and their values, if broadly acceptable solutions to agreed problems were to be found. Part 6: What effect did the topic have on students’ learning? As noted above the informal conversations towards the end of the topic indicated that students’ perspectives had changed. While the students’ views on the topic were not formally evaluated, their examination results indicated that those changes in thinking carried over at least until the end of the semester! Despite protests on my part about the limits of examinations as assessment tools, the students’ were subjected to two examinations: one part way through the semester and the second as a final summative assessment. I gave the students the same questions on the systems topic for both examinations: the first focused on listing systems properties and explaining the value of systemic perspectives, the second on the roles of engineers in public policy processes around environmental issues. For both examinations the students were given the questions in advance. Interestingly the quality of the students’ answers changed between the two examinations. In the first exam they were able to list and outline facts but their interpretation and justifications were weak. In the second exam, their responses placed more emphasis on interpretation and justification. Encouraging them to think differently seemed to have worked. From teaching to encouraging learning through systems Banathy (1999) proposes a new systems complex for higher education that shifts the focus of design and action from instruction to learning, with higher education redesigned around the learning experience level. Boud and Prosser (2002: 240) implicitly reflect his interests in their four principles for quality learning distilled from over thirty years of research in learning. These principles focus on: 1. Engaging learners. This includes starting from where learners are, taking into account their prior knowledge and their desires and building on their expectations. 2. Acknowledging the learning context. This includes the context of the learner, the course of which

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the activity is part and the sites of application of the knowledge being learned. 3. Challenging learners. This includes seeking to get learners to be active in their participation, using the support and stimulation of other learners, taking a critical approach to the materials and go beyond what is immediately provided. 4. Providing practice. This includes demonstration of what is being learned, gaining feedback, reflection on learning and developing confidence through practice. The local intervention described here was designed to reflect these principles in action and to shift the focus from teaching to learning. The learners started from a position based in science, overlaid with design and surrounded by New Zealand culture and society with rugby to the fore. They also were interested in environmental issues, problems and concerns. The learning experiences offered to them attempted to contextualize systems ideas, systems thinking and systems approaches in their lived experiences. They also were aimed to challenge the students to think more critically about their own future roles as environmental engineers. The trajectory from everyday usage through science and Copernicus to society and the All Blacks encouraged the students to think about systems concepts from multiple perspectives and applied in a variety of contexts. The threads then were pulled together to illustrate the potential benefits of systems approaches in coming to grips with environmental issues that are framed by the worldviews of science, engineering design and the humanities. While students were initially reluctant to deal with messy ideas - after two years steeped in fundamental science and engineering problem solving, most left the learning encounters acknowledging that ‘science is not enough’. References Attwater, R. (2000). “Pluralism, economic rhetoric, and common property”, Systemic Practice and Action Research, ISSN 1094429X, 13, 4, 543-557 Baker, V. E., Foote, J. L., Gregor, J. E., Houston, D. J. and Midgley, G. R. (2004). “Boundary Critique and community involvement in watershed management” in K. Dew and R. Fitzgerald (eds.) Challenging Science: Issues for New Zealand Society in the 21st Century, Palmerston North, New Zealand: Dunmore Press, ISBN 086469458X

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Banathy, B. (1999). “Systems Thinking in Higher Education: Learning comes into focus”, Systems Research and Behavioural Science, ISSN 1092-7026 print/1099-1743 (Online) 16, 133-145 Boud, D. and Prosser, M. (2002). “Appraising New Technologies for Learning: A Framework for Development” Education Media International, ISSN 09523987 print/14695790 online, 39, 3/4, 237-245 Carr, W. and Kemmis, S. (1986). Becoming Critical - Education, Knowledge and Action Research, London: Falmer Press, ISBN 1850000905 Daellenbach, H. (2002). “Systems Concepts” in H. Daellenbach and R. L. Flood, (eds.) The Informed Student Guide to the Management Sciences, London: International Thomson Press, ISBN 1861525427. Fitzgerald, R. and Dew, K. (2004) “Introduction: The chalelnges of challenging science” in Dew, K. and R. Fitzgerald (eds.) (2004) Challenging Science: Issues for New Zealand Society in the 21st Century, Palmerston North, New Zealand: Dunmore Press, ISBN 086469458X Hawk, D. L. (1999). “Innovation versus environmental protection presumptions”, Systemic Practice and Action Research, ISSN 1094429X, 12, 4, 355-366. Ingram, H. and Schneider, A. (1998). “Science, democracy and water policy”, Water Resources Update, 113, University Council on Water Resources [Available at http://ucowr.siu.edu/updates/ no ISSN number] Jackson, M. C. (2000). Systems Approaches to Management, New York: Kluwer, ISBN 030646500X. Lant, C (1998). “The changing nature of water management and its reflection in the academic literature”, Water Resources Update, 110, University Council on Water Resources [Available at http://ucowr.siu.edu/updates/ no ISSN number] McIntyre, J. (2004). “Facilitating Critical Systems Praxis (CSP) by means of experiential learning and conceptual tools.” Systems Research and Behavioural Science, ISSN 10927026/10991743 (Online) 21, 37-61 Midgley, G. (2002). “Boundary” in H. Daellenbach and R. L. Flood, (eds.) The Informed Student

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Guide to the Management Sciences, London: International Thomson Press, ISBN 0306464888. Midgley, G. (2002). “Critical Systems Thinking” in H. Daellenbach and R. L. Flood, (eds.) The Informed Student Guide to the Management Sciences, London: International Thomson Press, ISBN 1861525427. Toman, M. (1998). “Connecting scientific research agendas to social needs: some reflections”, Water Resources Update, 113, University Council on Water Resources [Available at http://ucowr.siu.edu/updates/ no ISSN number] Ulrich, W. (2002). “Boundary critique” in H. Daellenbach and R. L. Flood, (eds.) The Informed Student Guide to the Management Sciences, London: International Thomson Press, ISBN 1861525427.

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