How to teach resilience thinking in engineering education

Abstract

ABSTRACT A rapidly changing world with a high degree of uncertainty in the context of climate change requires sustainable and resilient infrastructures, for which engineers are jointly responsible. For this purpose, engineering students need to acquire competencies such as dealing with complexity and uncertainty, systems thinking and anticipatory thinking, which are linked to resilience. However, research has shown that engineering education falls short of providing future professionals with these competencies. This case study aims to give a holistic view of a teaching approach to address these shortcomings in the context of problem- and case-based learning. Based on a pre-post survey and reflective diaries, students’ perception of their competency development and their learning progress are analyzed and discussed, following a mixed-methods approach. Findings indicate that both perception of competencies related to systems resilience, such as analyzing scenarios and evaluating crisis approaches, and interpersonal competencies, such as communication and resolving conflicts have significantly improved during the course. At the same time, the former were less pronounced before the course and developed the most during the course. The results underline the need for fostering engineering students’ ability to dealing with resilience issues in order to design resilient infrastructure.