Defining education to support sustainable operation of buildings in the Nordic Countries

Paper i proceeding, 2017

The introduction of sustainable goals and concerns has brought many challenges to the construction sector. In particular, the combination of environmental, economic and social ambitions asks for complex solutions and require multidisciplinary competences. Likewise, construction sector related educations are facing similar challenges requiring them a crossing of barriers between traditional disciplines. Whereas most educations focus on technical and economic subjects, the social aspects of sustainability are often lagging behind. However, studies of implementation of sustainable solutions underline the importance of including all the actors concerned in the process and above all the users, but the different professionals of the sector often lack tools to do so. Engaged in the creation of a summer school gathering construction and facilities management students from three Scandinavian countries, we aim at planning and implementing such tools within our respective educational programs. Building on the stream of Project-based learning (PBL), where students acquire a deeper knowledge through active exploration of real-world challenges and problems, we intend to develop cases integrating issues related to implementations of sustainable solutions within facilities management. Such issues have been identified in a literature review and in a one-day workshop gathering more than 40 participants active in the sector. The challenge is to create a pedagogical platform which includes both theory and practice-oriented contributions and to build on their complementarity to enable the students to learn how to face and possible solve such issues. Moreover, the project offers the possibility to compare and reflect over the different educations in term of sustainability in facilities management as well as to explore the professional and cultural differences between the Nordic countries from our study that will be of interest to the reader.