ISSN: 2007-5316
8 24 Entretextos
diciembre 2016 - marzo 2017
SERVICE LEARNING FOR
SUSTAINABILITY: IDEALS TO PRACTICE
APRENDIENDO SOSTENIBILIDAD
MEDIANTE TRABAJO COMUNITARIO: DEL
IDEAL A LA PRÁCTICA
Annie R. Pearce*
Will Manion**
Artículo recibido: 01-06-2016
Aprobado: 22-08-2016
Abstract
Community-based service learning is used in engineering and construction
curricula to engage students in interesting, complex problems that benefit
the community while developing competencies essential to professional
practice. Service learning projects effectively expose students to issues
otherwise difficult to teach, including critical resource constraints, tactics
to overcome them, tradeoffs among possible solutions, systems integration,
and organizational challenges of implementation. However, they are often
underutilized due to the risks and challenges of integrating them into classes
and managing student involvement. This paper explores the questions of
what makes CBSL projects successful and the challenges faced by both
faculty and students who participate in them. The findings are based on
a literature analysis of challenges and a review of two service learning
projects implemented by a conjoint senior level/graduate class on sustainable
facility systems at Virginia Tech. Lessons learned are identified in three key
*Associate Professor,
areas: design as listening vs. design as inspiration, conflicting and unspoken
Myers-Lawson School of
Construction,Virginia Tech, objectives, and construction realities. Service learning projects offer a secure
USA; environment in which to learn about the challenges of construction, where
Ph. Doctor the unexpected is an expected and valued part of learning. Through these
[email protected] experiences, students can better understand the tradeoffs required to pursue
sustainability in capital projects and can better place sustainability objectives
**Associate Professor,
such as “minimize waste” and “reuse construction materials” in the context
Construction Engineering
and Technology, University of what these objectives require in practice.These projects also offer benefits
of Maine, USA; Ph. Doctor to clients in the community and afford the opportunity for civic engagement
[email protected] by students that may carry forward into their lives after graduation.
Entretextos UNIVERSIDAD IBEROAMERICANA LEÓN
Keywords: Learning by doing, student projects, construction engineering, sustainable development
Introduction
Service learning is a style of education in which students have
the opportunity to practice their professional skills in a real
world context, to benefit real world stakeholders. Unlike typical
classroom exercises, students engage with real clients about Service learning is a
the challenges they face, and must find solutions that fit within style of education in
the constraints those clients impose. While students often
enjoy these experiences of hands-on learning, they sometimes
which students have the
also undergo frustration as a result of the difference between opportunity to practice
expected and actual experiences in the project. This paper their professional skills
describes some of the service learning activities as part of in a real world context
sustainable construction education at Virginia Tech where key
learning experiences have taken place as students serve their
community while putting their theoretical skills into practice.
Background: The Challenges of Service
Learning
Community service projects are a natural component of civil
engineering and construction education programs, largely This paper describes
because of the public service orientation of their respective
professions. Many students love to get out of the traditional some of the service
classroom working with their hands and minds to solve real learning activities as
problems and/or build something meaningful. The concept part of sustainable
of service learning builds on this tendency, adding explicitly-
stated and assessed educational components to create a
construction education
broader beneficial learning experience. It is not just a recently at Virginia Tech
developed pedagogical approach, having “modern” roots in the
social activism of the 1960s, followed by community service for
democracy and citizenship in the 1970s and 80s, and finally as
an educational tool beginning in the 1990s (Barlow 2009). Now,
many educational practitioners understand that learning through service can be very effective,
providing students with opportunities to develop professional and independent learning skills as
well. In fact, service learning is one of the four emerging trends in engineering capstone courses,
along with technology, multidisciplinary projects and principles of sustainability (Scott Stanford et
al. 2010).
The body of knowledge for implementation of service learning projects in construction and
engineering sustainability is growing steadily (Pearce and Manion 2016). Cline and Kroth (2008)
have identified the following attributes of a good service learning project:
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1.Allow learners to practice construction management academic (and sustainability)
skills learned in the classroom using real-life experiential learning;
2. Provide an opportunity for learners to interact with project recipients;
3. Be feasible, considering the amount of time available;
4. Be complex enough to allow learners to be challenged, but not overwhelmed;
5. Contain an element that will allow for learning through reflection;
6. Evaluate the relative success of the project and the effect of the experiential
learning process.
Finding projects that meet these criteria can be challenging, although the number of efforts to
include service learning as documented in the literature continues to grow. Even after a suitable
project has been identified, many other challenges still plague faculty who wish to include service
learning in their curricula (Table 1).
The focus on challenges of service learning in the literature has been largely from a faculty standpoint,
but the specific challenges they bring to the forefront for students involved in these activities is
less documented.What special challenges do students face in design-build service learning projects
for sustainability? How do those challenges enrich their learning beyond conventional classroom
activities?
Learning Opportunities in Sustainable Construction
When undertaking design-build service learning courses with a goal of improving sustainability,
students have opportunities for learning about the challenges of sustainability implementation in ways
that are otherwise very difficult to learn in the classroom. The remainder of this paper describes
challenges faced by students participating in two service learning projects as part of a conjoint
sustainable construction class at Virginia Tech during spring semester 2016. Conjoint courses at
Virginia Tech involve shared learning experiences among two different levels of students (typically
graduate and undergraduate).
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Table 1: Challenges of Incorporating Service Learning
in Sustainable Design and Construction Courses
Burr & Martin 2003
Clevenger & Ozbek
Davis & Cline 2009
Lens & Dewoolkar
Steinemann 2003
Scott Stanford et
Pearce & Manion
Cline et al. 2014
Tinker & Tramel
Anderson 2007
Bernstein 2006
Bielefeldt 2010
Barlow 2009
Batie 2007
al. 2013
2013
2015
2016
2002
Design of suitable and feasible X X X
projects
Student mediocrity, lack of
commitment/follow through, X X X
and waning enthusiasm
Less-than-professional
construction workmanship X X X X X
and designs
Risk of being mistakenly
identified as a vocational X
program
Faculty and student workload,
particularly on weekends for X X X X
hands-on projects
Increased time for course
preparation, deliver y, and X X
evaluation
Finding time for reflection and
implementation during project X X X
completion
Non-traditional assessment and X X X
grading techniques
C o n s t r u c t i o n s a fe t y a n d X X X X X X X X
institutional liability
Negative student perceptions
of a lack of traditional course X
structure
Balance between instruction
and students’ agency to run X X
their own projects
Conflicts between stakeholder
opinions and good sustainability X X
practices
The learning objectives for both BC 4334, Sustainable Building Performance Management (senior
undergraduates) and BC 5134, Sustainable Facility Systems (graduate students) are to empower
students to:
• Identify a range of feasible and contextually appropriate best practices for improving
the sustainability of a built facility through multiple phases of its life cycle.
• Evaluate and compare these practices in terms of their relative performance
according to traditional qualitative and quantitative criteria such as first- and life
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cycle cost, performance, time, and quality, and in terms of their relative impacts on
facility sustainability.
• Design a recommended course of action to increase the sustainability of a facility
that takes into account the context of implementation.
• Support recommendations with convincing evidence and well-organized analysis
delivered in a professional fashion, and plan their implementation.
• Predict likely impacts of implementing those recommendations on specific projects
in terms of project sustainability.
Given the orientation of learning objectives around recommendations appropriate for specific
situations, working with real projects seemed a natural fit. The combined class size was sixteen
students, equally divided between fourth year undergraduates in the Sustainable Performance and
Energy Management track of the B.S. Building Construction degree and graduate students at the
M.S. and Ph.D. levels in disciplines including Civil Engineering, Building Construction, Environmental
Design and Planning, and Architecture.
In previous iterations of these courses, the project deliverables were reports and presentations, and
sometimes prototypes. However, in the 2015 conjoint offering of the course, the instructor elected
to engage students with two real projects involving local organizations as a means of increasing the
impact of learning for students while enhancing outreach and contributions to the local community.
Two projects were selected with the aim of having comparable scope. The first project (Figure 1)
involved designing and constructing a conference room made entirely of reused materials inside
the local Habitat for Humanity ReStore, to be used for board meetings and confidential meetings
with potential Habitat homeowners.The second project (Figure 2) was the design and construction
of a day room at a local municipal animal shelter for resident cats (the PantherHouse) to have the
opportunity to exercise outside their cages and interact more naturally with potential adopters.
Both organizations had previously been engaged with students from the School of Construction on
projects, and in both cases, the organizations themselves suggested the project as being a priority
for meeting current needs.
Figure 1: Habitat for Humanity ReStore Conference Room
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Projects were developed through a sequence of four major phases, including definition of
requirements; design; construction, and reflection. In addition to internal deliverables developed by
each team to document their work for a course grade, teams also conducted regular feedback cycles
with their clients to ensure that their solutions met client goals and requirements. In addition to
developing a design solution that met client goals, objectives, and constraints, students also had to
develop an implementation plan for the project that could be completed with available resources
and skills, within the operational constraints and challenges posed by the client organization.These
constraints included significant limitations on the timing of work, thus reducing the envelope for
construction to a very limited period of time in the second half of the semester. Ultimately, one
team was able to complete their project, while the other team was not. Three key lessons were
identified as a result of these projects, as follows.
Figure 2: Radford Animal Shelter PantherHouse
Design as Listening vs. Design as Inspiration
The iterative, client-centered design process used to structure the project required students to
consider the process of design differently than a designer-centric design process. Rather than
produce a design “inside their own heads” that they would then try to persuade the client to adopt,
the teams were stepped through distinct cycles of client input followed by ideation followed by
client feedback to ensure that their designs met all objectives and constraints of the client. During
ideation, teams were introduced to processes such as structured brainstorming that encouraged
them to conceptualize and develop ideas that were outside what clients would find acceptable.
These solutions were then explored and captured as part of a range of design scenarios to be
presented to the client for review, which enabled clients to more clearly articulate what they
liked and did not like about each design scenario. This process of presenting options as part of
a range of possible solutions rather than a single, stand-alone idea enabled students to remain
client-centered and focus on the client’s reactions and choices from multiple possibilities, rather
than becoming over-invested in a single concept of their own choosing. As such, students became
aware that design for sustainability is about finding options that are a good fit for the client through
an iterative process, rather than a mysterious process of inspiration where a fully-formed idea is
presented to a client to accept.
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Requirements Definition: Conflicting and Unspoken Objectives
Student involvement in the requirements definition phase of the work also exposed them to the
challenges faced by clients in clearly articulating objectives and constraints. Particularly with clients
who are not familiar with capital projects, a client’s vision for the end result may be far beyond what
can be reasonably achieved with the resources at hand. A key role of the design team is to help
clients understand and reconcile their vision with what is possible, given the resources and other
constraints available to the project. Clients may also hold unspoken objectives that are not well-
understood until the design team presents ideas that are not attractive to the client, even though the
client may not be able to articulate why that is the case. Presenting a range of ideas helps the design
team identify these unspoken objectives and verify them with the client without feeling threatened
by a client’s response to any one concept. Finally, client choices sometimes clearly conflict with
sustainability goals for the project, particularly if sustainability was not the dominant reason for
the project in the first place.When faced with the challenge of taking a project from requirements
definition through design and implementation, students must learn the art of compromise.
Incorporating sustainability as a driving design objective was a serious challenge in both projects,
as it often is in professionally-led projects. The common overriding desire is to complete the
project successfully, putting pressure on participants to make tradeoffs between scope and
sustainability. Unfortunately, with time-constrained project delivery of one semester, scope often
wins, as identified by students’ reflections at the end of the semester. Students also realized how
difficult it is to manage every aspect of sustainability in a project. For example, in the Habitat project,
the Habitat project manager procured standard construction materials, paying no attention to
students’ requests for more sustainable products or more alternatives not explicitly specified by
the students.
From a design standpoint, Habitat had a preconceived notion of how the wall system for the
conference room should be built and elected to revert to that notion despite less resource-
intensive and more sustainable options proposed by the students. Likewise, although the animal
control officer agreed in principle to sustainability as an objective in the PantherHouse project,
interior finishes were ultimately constrained by what the state inspector would approve as an
acceptable surface for contact with animals. The opportunity to communicate interactively with
state inspection officials was not forthcoming, so material specifications for interior finishes were
made based on affordability and sanitizability, even though this resulted in the use of products that
did not meet sustainability goals. Ultimately, by following a project through completion, students have
the opportunity to learn about the tradeoffs that must be made among complex and competing
objectives for sustainable projects.
Construction Realities
Finally, being responsible for planning and implementing the construction phase of a project
introduces students to challenges that they will regularly face in their professional lives in the
construction industry, as well as giving them a perspective on other key stakeholder roles necessary
for the construction of capital projects. In design-build service learning, students play both a project
management as well as a craft worker role, since they must both plan and actually execute the work.
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The level of construction experience in any given class may be highly variable, with students having
different types field internship experiences, experiences working in a trade, or even do-it-yourself
experiences. Likewise, levels of academic experience and training may also vary, as was the case with
our conjoint class a Virginia Tech.This means that while most students had at least basic estimating
skills and experience, few had the holistic experience of actually creating a purchase list of all the
components required for construction of an actual project. For example, students knew how to
estimate the total area of wall coverings required for the PantherHouse exterior, but did not realize
all the elements that had to be purchased to construct it, such as staples to attach the housewrap,
tape for the seams, and flashing for the base.This was also the first exposure some students had to
the challenge of minimizing seams and optimizing cuts in sheet materials for the exterior wall. Most
students in the sustainability class understood and endorsed the idea of minimizing waste during
the construction process, but until they had to actually put together the exterior wall covering of
a structure, they did not understand how material waste might trade off for labor costs or product
quality in assembling a drainage plane with a minimum of seams.
Students also had the opportunity in both projects to experience the challenges of field adjustments
to account for imprecision in existing buildings and construction materials.The ReStore conference
room was constructed inside an existing tenant area of a strip mall that did not have plumb walls,
and the structural frame constructed by the students had to be adjusted to account for this during
the assembly process. In a similar vein, students used locally manufactured Structural Insulated Panels
(SIPs) to construct the PantherHouse enclosure, and they learned the challenges of using typical
dimensional lumber with tight tolerances when the available lumber was warped or had other
deficiencies. The aim of both projects was to incorporate reused materials wherever possible as
part of the design, and students quickly learned that such materials are not always perfectly plumb
and square or structurally predictable. For example, the PantherHouse made extensive use of
vinyl replacement windows recovered from a local apartment complex that had been demolished.
While these windows were available for free, they required significant extra labor to clean prior
to installation, and some seals were broken that resulted in condensation between the glass panes
after installation.The replacement windows also came without nailing fins or flashing, meaning that
each window opening had to be carefully detailed and flashed to prevent water from entering the
building envelope. None of these issues would have arisen if using new windows for the project.
Conclusions: Service Learning for Sustainability
Employing service learning as a pedagogical approach in classes on sustainable design and
construction offers both challenges and opportunities compared to other types of pedagogy.While
many challenges have been identified with this approach from the standpoint of faculty who teach
the courses, less attention has been paid to the challenges faced by students taking the courses
and the learning opportunities these challenges provide. This paper explored three categories of
challenges – design as listening vs. design as inspiration, conflicting and unspoken objectives, and
construction realities – that emerged for students undertaking one of two service learning projects
in a conjoint sustainable construction course during spring semester 2015 at Virginia Tech. Service
learning projects offer a secure environment in which to learn about the challenges of construction,
where the unexpected is an expected and valued part of learning. Through these experiences,
students can better understand the tradeoffs required to pursue sustainability in capital projects
35
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and can better place sustainability objectives such as “minimize waste” and “reuse construction
materials” in the context of what these objectives require in practice. These projects also offer
benefits to clients in the community and afford the opportunity for civic engagement by students
that may carry forward into their lives after graduation.
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