What's Happening in Higher Education?
Student Needs and University Responses
27th Annual Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop
Boulder, CO, 14-17 July 2002.
Moderator: David McEntire, University of North TexasDiscussants:
- Chrys Rodrigue, California State University, Long Beach
- Brenda Philips, Jacksonville State University
- Kyle Rhone, Arkansas Tech University
- David Hoover, University of Akron
- Greg Shaw, George Washington University
Recorder: Wayne Blanchard, FEMA/Emergency Management Institute
The demand for qualified emergency and hazards managers has been on the rise since September 11. Now more than ever, these managers must have many skills and abilities to successfully execute the ever-broadening range of their field, implying that education programs must keep pace with this demand. This session will focus on the status of higher education emergency manage- ment programs and identify how student needs are determined and met.
I come at this question from a different perspective than the other panellists here. The others are involved in bachelor's and master's programs specifically in emergency management. My own campus does run a State-wide distance education program in occupational education. This program focusses on emergency services administration, and its purpose is to develop leadership and presentation skills for people already in the life safety technology and emergency management education settings. It confers both bachelor's and master's degrees and targets students entering with substantial experience in the emergency services or emergency education areas. My department is not involved in this program at the present time.I represent a traditional academic department of geography. We have several recently hired faculty, who are involved in hazards research and relevant geotechnical education, often collaboratively. We offer a bachelor's and master's degree in geography. Our department houses a NASA Regional Earth Science Applications Center, which concentrates largely on the application of remote sensing and GIS to the analysis and prediction of wildfire hazard in Southern California. Faculty in the department are interested in the physical dynamics of fire and flood hazards and the social dynamics of fire, earthquake, flood, technological, and public health hazards. We actively collaborate with similarly interested faculty in the departments of geology, anthropology, psychology, and biology in a series of NSF, NASA, University of California, and internally funded research projects. With this rather abrupt influx of hazards-oriented people, we will be offering our very first actual hazards class in the spring.
Additionally, we run a large curriculum in the geotechniques, including GIS, remote sensing, cartography, GPS, and spatial statistics, and this often emphasizes hazards identification, mapping, and analysis. We have a very successful internship program, which places students into well-paid internships in local municipal and county planning agencies, Jet Propulsion Lab, the ports, State agencies, and private firms in the aerospace, mapping, and environmental consulting areas. A number of our students are interested in K-12 and community college education as well.
So, our students' needs are both more applied and practical than seen in departments hosting research doctorate programs and more broad-based and liberal education focussed than those offering bachelor's or master's degrees specifically in emergency management (including the one based on our campus). Our students will not likely be among first responders or directly supervising them in an incident command framework. Rather, they often wind up in planning departments dealing with the updating and implementation of safety elements in general plans, providing GIS and similar backup to emergency managers and first responders, working in business research departments where they may have to think about business continuity and communications issues in a disaster, or teaching hazards among the geography components in K-14 education.
The area of hazards, risk, disaster management, and emergency response, then, speaks to an extremely diverse audience of professionals in training, and they have a diverse range of needs. The result has been a diversification of levels at which emergency and hazards education are offered. There are community college associate degree programs and certificates. There are traditional disciplinary and interdisciplinary bachelor's and master's degree programs, as well as certificates. There are also non-academic certificate programs that may be offered by community colleges, four-year institutions, and vocational education schools, often through extension services.
First responders from the fire departments have highly specialized and common needs for information and training to handle the range of hazards common or imaginable in their jurisdictions. My colleagues here are better qualified than I to address how various levels of the higher education system identify and accommodate these students' needs.
Urban, regional, small town, and environmental planners have more diverse needs and concerns that can best be met through baccalaureate and master's degree programs. The key issue for the hazards and emergency management communities here is building support in the planning community for requiring hazards education, including the integration of first responders in the process of emergency planning. Planning programs have their own certification mechanisms, as, for example, the AICP certification of planning practitioners that is increasingly valued. It is perhaps here that the hazards community can make the most effective interventions in the education of planners to deal with disaster and emergency management. Some of this is going on here, as individual planners develop interests in this area and seek information. Perhaps the Center could target the AICP for a sustained lobbying effort.
What my department now does most actively for the sake of emergency management and disaster planning education is train students in GIS, remote sensing, cartography, GPS, and statistics. As seen in sessions throughout this Workshop and in the posters, GIS and related geotechniques are recognized for their value in real-time response to a disaster and long term pre-event risk assessment and planning. Like emergency management itself, the geotechniques are used by people at various levels of preparation and responsibility, and GIS education has diversified into levels similar to the diversification of emergency management education. We have community colleges teaching GIS, some focussing on software operation. Baccalaureate and master's institutions convey elements such as database structure, SQL, data format conversions, cartographic design, programming, the statistical quirks of spatial data, and GIS design and implementation. Doctoral programs actively push the conceptual basis of GIS and related technologies.
I would like to discuss some of the problems we have had with GIS education as a parable for potential problems in emergency management education. A problem we have encountered at CSULB is the haphazard and uncoördinated profusion of GIS programs in the community colleges. This has led to an articulation nightmare, as community college transfers don't understand why their several lower division courses in GIS cannot articulate with upper division GIS courses, even when the classes are of high quality. I suspect that emergency management curricula may plow into this problem if there is significant transfer of associate's degree graduates of emergency management programs into bachelor's granting institutions to pursue an interest in emergency management or, more broadly, hazards.
Another parallel from GIS education that may affect emergency management education is the concept of certification. Many people try to take a class in GIS and then represent themselves as trained in GIS. As truly well-trained GIS people become more common and contrast more and more with poorly trained people, there has begun to build a lot of pressure for some kind of certification of GIS practitioners. Several professional societies are trying to respond to this need, and standards for GIS education are beginning to emerge as guidelines for extant and proposed programs, particularly those in community colleges. The hazards and emergency management communities should consider ways of professional certification of certificate programs, particularly those serving the more focussed and narrowly defined needs of first responders and emergency management organizations. FEMA is laying the basis for this through its EMI prototype degree programs, which you can pick up in the poster session. As Dave Garrett noted earlier today, FEMA is also encouraging certification of specific, narrowly defined areas of expertise, such as search and rescue or hazmat.
So, in a nutshell, there is tremendous diversity of student needs and cur- ricular responses. If the parallels with GIS education are valid, then hazards education and emergency management education may need to address the issues of interprogram articulation and practitioner certification.