Teaching Industry Disruption: Studying LBC Projects to Develop Carbon Positive Knowledge, Behaviors, & Advocacy

Abstract

The urgency of addressing climate change challenges architectural educators to employ methods for cultivating stewardship and advocacy in emerging designers by integrating a broad array of performance domains into the curriculum. This study contributes to the literature on teaching with case-based pedagogical methods by analyzing deliverables from an applied professional practice course studying Living Buildings, which are designed to meet the most stringent certifications and rating systems developed by the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Owner (AECO) community. Voices from the Field is a seminar and field-based course that employs cases pursuing high performance standards to demonstrate the interrelationship of technical, organiza¬tional, behavioral, and operational domains in the process of taking buildings from concept to realization. The study analyzes four sets of course deliverables produced by students who studied two Living Building Challenge (LBC) projects. The deliverables, called Field Reports, comprise student accounts of the project issues that arise from their review of project documentation, their construction site visits, and their interviews of project team members. Using a grounded approach, the Field Reports were coded for evidence that students increased their understanding of the strategies, attitudes, and behaviors necessary to achieve advanced building performance targets. Importantly, the analysis also demonstrated that students gained greater understanding of the advocacy necessary to apply their sustainable ideals to real world contexts. The research considers how to empower emerging practitioners to disrupt established design, construction, and regulatory systems in order to build a more sustainable and equitable society.