Environmental Management Systems and Standards-Based Education: A Modular Approach

摘要

The case for systematic management of corporate environmental efforts and impacts has been made. Corporations have shifted their priorities toward mitigation efforts, with success. Recent decades have seen a significant increase in corporate adoption of voluntary environmental management programs, based on national and international standards. As we look toward the future, it is clear that we must continue to grow capable professionals that not only understand the challenges but also grasp the systems and methods of strategic, corporate-driven environmental risk management.This research presents the experience of developing and implementing standards-based risk management curricula across related degree programs, and the results achieved. The Rochester Institute of Technology's (RIT)'s College of Applied Science and Technology, Department of Civil Engineering Technology, Environmental Management and Safety faculty developed a modular approach for integrating ISO management systems standards into environmental management curricula under a grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This modular approach was applied to curricular content for the ISO 14001 environmental management systems (EMS) standard, and allows scalability of the material from a one-lecture introduction to a course-level exploration of EMS design and implementation, depending upon program and instructor needs. This modular approach also supports implementation in courses outside a typical environmental health and safety curriculum to an engineering and policy curriculum, which makes it useful for the broad range of programs that are producing our corporate environmental professionals of the future. The curricula not only teaches the structure of the standards that influence EHS management, but also their application and implementation in various corporate contexts.The results indicate that this instructional design approach was successful in enhancing student preparedness for careers in environmental management, and in achieving student learning outcomes related to standards implementation, due in particular to the use of real-life examples and situations to enable critical thinking and practical application of knowledge.