I’ve taken over from a colleague as the school teaching sustainability lead. In terms of my workload, the role notionally occupies 0.1 FTE of my staff tutor role. In real money, this is 25 days of academic time.
I was inspired to take on the sustainability lead role after completing something called Carbon Literacy training, which I found really interesting.
For the R88 Computer Science with AI, I was asked (along with other 'leads') to draft a single page briefing note for module teams. The aim was to answer three questions:
- How do we address sustainability within our teaching?
- Why is sustainability important?
- Who to contact for advice?
In the spirit of openness and transparency, I’m sharing a draft copy of what I’ve put together on this blog. In addition to being relevant to R88, this note also can, of course, also apply to other programmes.
This post is intended for module team members and module chairs, but it also offers some links that may be useful to others.
What is sustainability?
A definition: The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines the property of environmental sustainability as “the degree to which a process or enterprise is able to be maintained or continued while avoiding the long-term depletion of natural resources” (2.b)
There is also an important and useful connection to the 17 UN sustainable development goals. As a discipline, computing relates to many of these. Ones that are immediately important relate to the topics of energy (7), industry (9), and consumption and production (12). Since IT can embody of mediate political power, there is a connection between other goals which relate to both equality and justice.
Why is sustainability important?
There are multiple reasons why it is important to consider sustainability:
- Sustainability is fundamental to our well-being.
- Computing is a discipline that places material demands on our environment, and it is necessary to to be mindful of what those demands are, and how material and energy consumption may be measured.
- Sustainability relates to ethics, power and responsibility. In turn, it is also connected to the topics of equality and access.
- In considering sustainability, we must also apply critical thinking skills. By considering sustainability within our pedagogy, we are also given ideas that can be used to further develop and refine critical thinking skills.
- Understanding and thinking about sustainability is likely to become an important employability skill.
Pedagogical guidance
The following tools and resources are likely to be useful for module teams:
- Inclusive Curriculum Tool (available only to internal staff)
- OpenLearn: Sustainable pedagogies
- AdvanceHE: Embedding ethical and sustainable employability in tertiary education: best practice examples
- Learning Design: Sustainability resources in HE (OU Learning Design team, PDF)
- UCL: Embedding sustainability into your teaching and learning
Resources
What follows is are some links that are specific to computing, beginning with the QAA benchmark standard: QAA Subject Benchmark Statement for Computing
Appendix 2 offers some examples of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). QAA suggests students should study ‘the effect that computing has on the environment via mining and mineral extraction, manufacturing and transport, cloud computing and energy usage’ (p.30).
The QAA benchmark standard references three interesting papers:
Abernethy, K. and Treu, K. (2014) 'Integrating sustainability across the computer science curriculum', Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, vol. 30, issue 2, pp 220–228. Available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.5555/2667432.2667464
Penzenstadler, B. et al, (2018) 'Everything is INTERRELATED: Teaching Software Engineering for Sustainability'. IEEE/ACM 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSESEET), pp 153-162. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3183377.3183382
Gordon, N (2015) 'Sustainable Development as a Framework for Ethics and Skills in Higher Education Computing Courses', In: Leal Filho, W., Brandli, L., Kuznetsova, O., Paço, A. (eds) (2015) Integrative Approaches to Sustainable Development at University Level, World Sustainability Series, Springer. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10690-8_24
As an aside, I also really like this paper, which is a bit of an eye opener:
Pereira, R. et al. (2017) 'Energy efficiency across programming languages: how do energy, time, and memory relate?' In: Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE 2017). Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 256–267. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3136014.3136031
I also like the following text, which specifically addresses energy efficiency. It connects software architecture, practical problem solving through the application of tactics, with the important notion of software quality:
Bass, L., Clements, P. & Kazman, R. (2021) Software Architecture in Practice, 4th Edition. Addison-Wesley Professional.
Available through the O’Reilly Safari library.
A practical perspective
Since computing touches on so many different aspects of humanity and society, every computing programme should address sustainability. The question, is of course, how?
Consider the different stakeholders that are mentioned in your module. Where there are people, there are also ethics. Where there are ethics, there are also questions of power and responsibility. Who are those people, and what can they influence?
You might want to consider the following perspectives (listed in alphabetical order):
- Artificial intelligence (and how it relates to sustainability)
- Decolonisation
- Energy consumption
- Engineering
- Ethics
- International perspectives
- Power (as in political power and responsibility)
- Sociotechnical perspectives and analysis
- Legislation
Consider using these themes, or variations of these themes to create activities that can be embedded within your module.
In this context ‘engineering’ can refer to finding ways to solve a problem in an effective way. It can also mean finding solutions that are energy or resource efficient. Whenever there is engineering, there are also trade-offs to be made.
Contact and feedback
If you would like to discuss how sustainability can be addressed in your computing module, please do get in touch. Also, do let me know if any of this guidance has been helpful during the production of your module.
Reflections
I have some way to go before l I find my feet with this role. I do feel as if I need to contact other colleagues who have similar roles in other schools, if only to compare notes. I plan to update this blog from time to time with more information and guidance.