In this new series, The Applied Ecologist is amplifying the staff and student voices from the University of Surrey’s Centre for Environment and Sustainability to showcase their diverse, interdisciplinary body of work and to help inspire the next generation.
In this post, Jonathan Chenoweth talks about the practitioner training programmes at the Centre for Environment and Sustainability.
Meet Jonathan Chenoweth
I am a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Environment and Sustainability and I am the director of the Centre’s BSc and MSc programmes.
“I really enjoy the interaction with students when teaching on postgraduate modules and supervising dissertation projects. Our enthusiastic and high motivated students really enrich the learning and research process for staff and their fellow students.”
What do you work on within the Centre?
I research a host of inter-disciplinary sustainability topics within the centre such as life cycle analysis, sustainable travel and tourism, food and water resources management. Like others at the centre, much of my sustainability research underpins the teaching programmes that I lead, including the practitioners training programme. Research projects provide great examples for lectures that can help illustrate theoretical concepts and show their relevance. They can also provide interesting case study problems which students can work on in class.
Practitioner training is at the heart of the Centre for Environment and Sustainability’s education for sustainable development. We run three MSc programmes – MSc in Sustainable Development, MSc in Corporate Environmental Management and the MSc in Environmental Strategy. The modules for these programmes – including the postgraduate Environmental Science and Society module which I teach – are all taught as week-long intensive training courses. Students have pre-module readings to complete prior to attending the module and some modules have a coursework associated with these pre-readings.
What is unique about these programmes?
The teaching format of our MSc programmes is very unusual as most similar programmes consist of modules taught weekly over a full semester.
We find that our intensive modular format makes the MSc programmes accessible to people who are working fulltime and are not local to the university. Rather than having to attend the university every week, students working fulltime take a week of leave to attend campus and take a module. The full MSc can be completed over a period of up to five years via the use of annual leave rather than requiring study leave from an employer.
The intensive modules are also available as Continuing Professional Development (CPD) courses. Some of the more applied modules, such as Life Cycle Assessment which teaches students how to use the SimaPro software and conduct life cycle assessments, are popular CPD choices. As many as a third of the students taking the module can be CPD people from industry and thus coming from a broad range of backgrounds, ages and levels of experience. This mix ensures rich class discussions and group work that build on existing practitioner experience. Where someone takes multiple modules on a CPD basis and successfully complete the coursework for these modules, they can later count the academic credit from these modules against an MSc programme if they subsequently choose to enrol in a full MSc degree.
Does the Centre run other similar programmes?
In the Centre for Environment and Sustainability we also run a Practitioner Doctorate in Sustainability PhD programme. This is a collaborative programme whereby doctoral students are placed in industry to do inter-disciplinary sustainability research on problems and challenges identified by the university’s industry partners. Students on this Practitioner Doctorate programme initially begin with a 12-week training programme at the University of Surrey and undertake a series of sustainability modules and personal development workshops.
They are then based at their industrial sponsor where they integrate into the organisation and focus on their research project under the close supervision of an industrial supervisor from the company and two academic supervisors from the University. Research projects span across a range of sustainability challenges – from analysing strategies for increasing biodiversity in the built environment for a construction and property services company, to sustainable product development or the application of life cycle assessment to manufacturing processes. I’ve supervised practitioner doctorate students working on a range of projects, such as a student working for a local water company on phosphorus removal from wastewater, or a student working on working in facilities management on reducing water and energy consumption across a large campus estate.
Why are practitioner training programmes important?
Academic staff at the centre recognise the importance of education for sustainable development. Demand for environment and sustainability professionals has grown significantly in recent years as the scale of the challenge presented by climate change and the societal transformation it requires has been understood.
While producing new highly-skilled graduates in environment and sustainability is important, equally, providing accessible training and skills development to existing practitioners is also important. Over the course of a career many people will move between different roles even if they stay in the same company or industry sector. Helping those who take on sustainability roles mid-career to gain the knowledge and skills to do these roles effectively is critical.
For more information
For more information about the Practitioner Doctorate projects, please go to this link.
