Abstract
The increased complexity of renewable energy systems derives in uncertain and vulnerable systems behavior, making necessary for energy experts to understand and apply resilience studies with interdisciplinary approaches. With this aim, we have designed a postgraduate course on resilience of energy systems, pursuing an “exchange interdisciplinarity” level that enables students to (i) become aware of competing approaches in terms of methods and theories stemming from different disciplines, and (ii) to critically argue on the suitability of presented concepts for energy systems design and management. The course aimed at achieving a sound level of exchange interdisciplinarity as defined in relevant literature. We chose the following specific teaching methods and didactic items to facilitate this aim and address the different challenges of interdisciplinary education identified from the literature: fundamental introduction (FI), expert interviews and deepening workshops. The FI aimed at providing a sound common basis for understanding the perspectives and approaches from different disciplines. The expert lecture series exposed students to the broadness of state-of-the-art approaches existing in resilience research for energy systems, while the deepening workshops allowed students to develop a deep and critical appraisal of the disciplinary approaches and their relations. The course impact is evaluated through the standard questionnaire for teaching evaluation from the University of Oldenburg. The evaluation shows that the course fostered a critical and interdisciplinary thinking, with a high and interactive participation through the use of multiple didactic measures. This is supported by the high satisfaction of the students, the high level of engagement and academic performance and the qualitative perception from the lecturers. Topics of similar complexity or interdisciplinarity in energy higher education, such as sustainability, technology assessment or energy systems analysis could also benefit from such a course design.
Highlights
Renewable energy systems have evolved from a niche technology following a “small is beautiful” approach (Schuhmacher, 1999; Bortman, 1976) to largely complex systems (Labanca, 2017), involving a great number of technology interactions and a great variety of stakeholders
Such a course is deeply confronted with the main challenges in interdisciplinary teaching (Sarah Falcus, Christopher Cameron, 2019), (Bradbeer, 1999): (i) students difficulties in moving across disciplines; (ii) lack of understanding of new disciplinary approaches; (iii) difficulties in synthesizing different disciplinary views
Interdisciplinarity is significantly different from multi-disciplinarity, where different disciplines work on a joint research programme without being aware of the contributions from other disciplines and cross-disciplinarity, where a discipline works on a problem from another disciplinary field with its traditional disciplinary methods without adapting or developing different methodological approaches (Davies & Devlin, 2010)
Summary
Renewable energy systems have evolved from a niche technology following a “small is beautiful” approach (Schuhmacher, 1999; Bortman, 1976) to largely complex systems (Labanca, 2017), involving a great number of technology interactions and a great variety of stakeholders. The developed approaches range from defining resilience as a guiding-concept for systems design and operation (Gößling-Reisemann, 2016), (Brand and von Gleich, 2015), to establishing a comprehensive set of metrics (Roege et al 2014), appraisal methods (Wyss, Mühlemeier, and Binder, 2018) or following an epistemological approach aiming at making obvious incompatibilities in different resilience approaches (Hamborg et al, 2019). For the second goal, two conditions are of fundamental importance: (a) a broad introduction to available approaches with relevance for energy systems analysis; (b) a sound understanding of different disciplinary approaches existing for resilience research applied to energy systems Such a course is deeply confronted with the main challenges in interdisciplinary teaching (Sarah Falcus, Christopher Cameron, 2019), (Bradbeer, 1999): (i) students difficulties in moving across disciplines; (ii) lack of understanding of new disciplinary approaches; (iii) difficulties in synthesizing different disciplinary views.
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