Teaching and research capacity of disaster resilience in the built environment higher education in Sri Lanka

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.