Abstract:
Built Environment (BE) is immensely damaged due to the increased intensity of
disasters. Therefore, the BE professionals are expected to react effectively and
efficiently during both pre-disaster and post disaster phases. Nevertheless, the
existing knowledge insufficiency on disaster resilience (DR) acts as a barrier for the
professionals to deliver an effective service. Thus, incorporating DR studies within
the higher education curriculum has been identified as one of the action plans by the
Disaster Management Centre in Sri Lanka. This research, therefore, sets out to
enhance the current teaching and research capacity in the field of DR among the BE
disciplines in Sri Lankan state universities. This study adopts a phenomenological
philosophy and uses multi-method qualitative as the methodological choice in
deriving a conclusion. Under survey strategy, desk study and semi-structured
interviews were incorporated as the data collection techniques. The findings were
subjected to manual content analysis.
The importance of acquiring DR knowledge by BE professionals are confirmed in
the literature review. This research developed a landscape using desk study to
identify the current status of DR education in terms of teaching and research among
BE disciplines in the state universities in Sri Lanka. The landscape revealed that
among the departments that offer BE related programmes, the teaching modules that
are related to DR are comparatively limited. Nevertheless, the research activities
related to DR are conducted in most of the BE related departments. The key drivers
for the integration of DR into the BE education are to make BE professionals
responsible in building a habitable world to human-beings and to face the increasing
number of disasters, the personal research interest, expertise of academic staff
members in the DR related research area, and the social responsibility of the
academics. The key barriers encountered in terms of DR teaching and research
capacities were the heavily loaded modules specific to the degree programme of the
curriculum, the high priority given for the technical knowledge, not updating the
curriculum frequently to meet the emerging knowledge requirements, lack of
resource persons, and lack of awareness on educating BE professionals with DR
knowledge. Finally, recommendations were suggested to effectively incorporate DR
knowledge within the higher education curriculums and research activities on the BE
disciplines of the state universities in Sri Lanka.
Citation:
Nanayakkara, N.B. (2023). Teaching and research capacity of disaster resilience in the built environment higher education in Sri Lanka [Master's theses, University of Moratuwa]. Institutional Repository University of Moratuwa. http://dl.lib.uom.lk/handle/123/22209