Please join us for a webinar by Rhodes University academics, Andrew Todd and Jono Davy, on Using Service-Learning to promote values of Human Factors and Ergonomics and Sustainability. The webinar will take place on Wednesday, 1 September from 2:30 – 3:30 (South African Time).
Register here: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcscuqrqjIoH90nke3KZ1NLbjHuDZEAWvfJ
Using service-learning to promote the values of Human Factors and
Ergonomics and Sustainability
Andrew Todd and Jonathan Davy
Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE) is the discipline that focuses on understanding the interactions between humans and other elements of the system for the dual outcomes of improving or maintaining human well-being and system performance. Achieving these outcomes, which directly speak the sustainable development goal of decent work for all requires the adoption of a systems approach, and consequently, the discipline has branched out into the areas of ergo-ecology and green ergonomics. Through these the values and principles of human factors and ergonomics have emerged as respect for the earth, respect for human rights, respect for ethical decision making, respect for transparency and openness, an appreciation for complexity and respect for diversity (Lange-Morales et al., 2015). It is clear from these values and principles that there is a strong link between HFE and sustainability and consequently with the sustainable development goals. Furthermore, Wilson (2014) argued that the nature of HFE required practitioners to have an appreciation of six fundamental notions of HFE: systems, context, interactions, holism, emergence and embedding. Providing students with learning experiences that can effectively convey both Wilson’s notions and the values of HFE can be challenging. We have, however, found that Service Learning is potentially an excellent pedagogy to achieve these goals while simultaneously allowing us to infuse some of the sustainable development goals into our curriculum. The presentation will focus on providing an outline of how we have gone about developing our service learning modules, the emergent challenges and how we have tentatively linked them to sustainability and the sustainable development goals.