Refocusing sustainability education: using students’ reflections on their carbon footprint to reinforce the importance of considering CO2 production in the construction industry

The construction industry is the most significant contributor to the UK’s CO2 emissions. It is responsible for an annual output of approximately 45% of the total. This figure highlights the role the industry must play in helping to achieve the UK Government’s CO2 reduction target. It is ergo incumbent on construction-related educators to emphasise this issue and explore ways in which it can be achieved. Unintentional desensitisation has resulted in the term ‘sustainability’, particularly CO2 production, being seen by students as just another concept to be studied from a theoretical perspective. Many students fail to grasp its broader implications and how it should affect strategic environmental decisions about construction processes, technologies, and products. In an attempt to address this problem, an innovative learning, teaching, and assessment strategy was used with final year undergraduate construction students to improve their level of sustainability literacy. The theory of threshold concepts in the context of transformative learning was used as the baseline philosophy to the study. The approach involved asking students to calculate their carbon footprint and to reflect upon and extrapolate their findings to the construction industry and its practice. Content analysis was performed on the reflective commentaries acquired from student portfolios collected over four academic years. The results showed how the students’ reflections on their carbon footprints proved to be an enlightening experience. Terms such as ‘shocked by my footprint’, ‘surprised at the findings’, and ‘change in attitude’ were among the contemplative comments. When students linked their findings to the construction industry, phrases such as ‘waste generation’, ‘technologies’, and ‘materials’ were some of the concepts considered. By using their personal experiences as a benchmark, students were able to gain a deeper level of understanding of the causes and consequences of CO2 production. They also found it more straightforward to relate these issues to the construction industry and its practice. Several novel recommendations are made to raise the level of sustainability literacy in the construction industry thereby facilitating a potential reduction in worldwide CO2 production

From student to young professional: Exploring the impact of work-based placements on the transformation of undergraduate construction students

From education to accountancy, nursing to tourism, literature is awash with studies relating to work-based placements yet there appears to be little which specifically addresses the construction industry. Work-based placement literature often argues that students return to university from their placement a different person, somehow transformed. However, the majority of this literature focusses on the transformative outcome, with little empirical research investigating the transformational process itself. The following thesis offers a phenomenological study which seeks to address these two gaps in knowledge by exploring the transformational journey upon which construction undergraduates travel during a work-based placement. Framed within Jack Mezirow’s transformative learning theory, it investigates work-based placements from the student’s perspective, examining the issues they face and searching for answers to how and if a placement can affect the transformation of students. A mixed methods approach consisting of semi-structured interviews and a self-administered explorative questionnaire was used to examine the experiences of placement students before and after their placement. The qualitative data were subjected to a thematic analysis to establish key themes, while the quantitative data were subjected to a series of statistical tests and summaries to uncover patterns, associations and differences. The data revealed that at the beginning of their placement students had an overwhelming sense of inadequacy, a lack of confidence and an uncertainty as to how they would perform and, while learning was clearly taking place, at times it was almost on an ad-hoc basis. Transformation was occurring but many students were unaware of this change. There were many factors which contributed to their transformation with the key finding being a self-perpetuating cycle of an increase in knowledge and experience leading to increased confidence which gradually changed them from student to young professional

Determinants of risky substance use and risky gambling

Risky substance use and risky gambling describe behaviour that has the potential for, but does not actually result in, harm to the individual engaging in the behaviour, their friends, and family, or wider society. Drawing together evidence from 12 disciplines working in the field of substance use and gambling, this chapter presents determinants of the transition from no use or low-risk use to risky substance use or risky gambling, operating across three levels of analysis: the social, economic, and political environment; the individual; and the cellular and molecular. Determinants within each level of analysis are clustered into domains, such as social and economic marginalization, gender and sexuality, personality traits, and neuroadaptations. There is much interaction between factors operating across the three levels of analysis. A key finding is that the social, economic, and political environment is particularly important for understanding transitions to risky behaviour