Board 35: Essentials of the Nurse + Engineer: Defining Public Value for Civil Engineers

Daniel B Oerther; Sarah Oerther

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Conference: 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Portland, Oregon
Publication Date: June 23, 2024
Start Date: June 23, 2024
End Date: July 12, 2024
Conference Session: Civil Engineering Division (CIVIL) Poster Session
Tagged Division: Civil Engineering Division (CIVIL)
Permanent URL: https://strategy.asee.org/46932

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Paper Authors

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Daniel B Oerther P.E. Missouri University of Science and Technology orcid.org/0000-0002-6724-3205

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Professor Daniel B. Oerther, PhD, PE, BCEE, DLAAS, FAAN(h) joined the faculty of the Missouri University of Science and Technology in 2010 as the John A. and Susan Mathes Chair of Civil Engineering after serving for ten years on the faculty of the University of Cincinnati where he was head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Professor Oerther is internationally recognized for leadership of engineers, sanitarians, and nurses promoting the practice the sustainable development, local to global. Dan is a Past President of the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists. He is a Diplomate Laureate of the American Academy of Sanitarians. Dan is a lifetime honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. Professor Oerther's awards as an educator include lifetime honorary Fellowship in the National League for Nursing's Academy of Nursing Educators and the Robert G. Quinn Award from the American Society for Engineering Education.

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Sarah Oerther

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Abstract

Increasingly civil engineers are being asked to incorporate a more inclusive meaning of “public” (i.e., who) and “public value” (i.e., inherently moral concepts) when planning, designing, and supervising the construction and maintenance of building and infrastructure projects. One way to improve the meaning of public and value is to borrow from the adjacent profession of nursing. Nurses are well-known patient-centered care, whether the patient is an individual, a population, or the public. Unlike civil engineers, who access public views by interacting with representative stakeholders, the nurse “builds up” a view of the public by collecting information on individuals, which are grouped into populations, and ultimately assembled into a sum that provides an aggregate measure of public views. To provide civil engineers with exposure to a nursing approach to building up a public view from interactions with individuals, a teaching module was designed to explain the concepts of “risk” and “sustainability”. This module was incorporated into a department-wide required course entitled, “Fundamentals of Environmental Engineering.” This course is required of undergraduate students of civil engineering, architectural engineering, and environmental engineers. This article includes details of the module. In particular, students are invited to answer an open ended questions, “how much would you pay to watch a perfect sunset?”, and the results of student responses are used as part of teaching. The results of student response before and after a lecture module show a clear trend away from extreme answers of “everything” (i.e., a sunset is priceless) and “nothing” (i.e., a sunset is free), and towards a better understanding of public value and an answer that reflects “some dollar amount,” which is created from the sum of the values expressed by each individual. A subsequent lecture module introduces students to the concept of full-cost accounting as a way to integrate individual values into a net aggregate public value. We discuss an important limitation of this approach, namely that assessing the “value of a sunset” may be biased for those who are visually impaired, colorblind, or photosensitive. This work highlights the convergent approach known as the nurse+engineer, where transdisciplinary integration across two diverse professions is used to solve a pressing societal challenge, in this case a more inclusive meaning of public value constructed from a collection of individual values expressed by individual people in response to the question, “what is the value of a sunset”.

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Format

Oerther, D. B., & Oerther, S. (2024, June), Board 35: Essentials of the Nurse + Engineer: Defining Public Value for Civil Engineers Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://strategy.asee.org/46932

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - Increasingly civil engineers are being asked to incorporate a more inclusive meaning of “public” (i.e., who) and “public value” (i.e., inherently moral concepts) when planning, designing, and supervising the construction and maintenance of building and infrastructure projects. One way to improve the meaning of public and value is to borrow from the adjacent profession of nursing. Nurses are well-known patient-centered care, whether the patient is an individual, a population, or the public. Unlike civil engineers, who access public views by interacting with representative stakeholders, the nurse “builds up” a view of the public by collecting information on individuals, which are grouped into populations, and ultimately assembled into a sum that provides an aggregate measure of public views. To provide civil engineers with exposure to a nursing approach to building up a public view from interactions with individuals, a teaching module was designed to explain the concepts of “risk” and “sustainability”. This module was incorporated into a department-wide required course entitled, “Fundamentals of Environmental Engineering.” This course is required of undergraduate students of civil engineering, architectural engineering, and environmental engineers. This article includes details of the module. In particular, students are invited to answer an open ended questions, “how much would you pay to watch a perfect sunset?”, and the results of student responses are used as part of teaching. The results of student response before and after a lecture module show a clear trend away from extreme answers of “everything” (i.e., a sunset is priceless) and “nothing” (i.e., a sunset is free), and towards a better understanding of public value and an answer that reflects “some dollar amount,” which is created from the sum of the values expressed by each individual. A subsequent lecture module introduces students to the concept of full-cost accounting as a way to integrate individual values into a net aggregate public value. We discuss an important limitation of this approach, namely that assessing the “value of a sunset” may be biased for those who are visually impaired, colorblind, or photosensitive. This work highlights the convergent approach known as the nurse+engineer, where transdisciplinary integration across two diverse professions is used to solve a pressing societal challenge, in this case a more inclusive meaning of public value constructed from a collection of individual values expressed by individual people in response to the question, “what is the value of a sunset”.
AU  - Daniel B Oerther P.E.
AU  - Sarah Oerther
CY  - Portland, Oregon
DA  - 2024/06/23
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Board 35: Essentials of the Nurse + Engineer: Defining Public Value for Civil Engineers
UR  - https://strategy.asee.org/46932
ER  -