The Impact of the Process of Academic Education on Differences in Landscape Perception between the Students of Environmental Engineering and Civil Engineering

Abstract

As technical and technological progress takes place, there is dissonance between teaching good engineering and technological techniques and respect for the landscape. Engineering students are educated to act as initiators and performers of activities that change space. The purpose of this study is to answer question regarding how the engineering students recognize problems related to shaping the landscape. In the years 2012–2015, surveys were conducted in a group of 274 students of the University in their final year of environmental engineering and civil engineering studies, in order to find the main characteristics related to the problem. Students tended to assess the landscape in a manner determined by their education in natural science—emphasizing the division between the well-shaped natural landscape and the malformed anthropogenic one. There were differences between the groups of students—civil engineering students noticed the qualities of architectural objects and shaped greenery in their perception of the landscape in urban areas more often than the environmental engineering students did. There were no differences in the perception of the landscape in rural areas. The harmonious landscape was described as rural, modern, undeveloped and common. The landscape regarded as degraded was built-up and common. There were no changes in the perception of the landscape resulting from the educational profile among the environmental engineering students. The time has come to change methods of teaching the students of engineering and technical sciences about the landscape. This should result in an improvement in their perception of landscape phenomena.

A Spherical Video-Based Immersive Virtual Reality Learning System to Support Landscape Architecture Students’ Learning Performance during the COVID-19 Era

“…Moreover, due to insufficient visits and excursions, the effect of traditional landscape education is poor. Students aspire to have a new technology incorporated into the classroom to replace the previous one-way knowledge transfer process [36,37]. The new change also requires teachers to continuously improve their technical skills and teaching capacity in order to adapt to the development and changing times and to meet the increasing demands of students regarding classroom technology and environment [38].…”

“…The development of VR also brings a great deal of enlightenment to landscape education. Greinert and Mrówczyńska's [36] study indicated that adopting modern educational technology can improve students' ability to solve landscape problems.…”

Discovering Unwritten Stories—A Modular Case Study in Promoting Landscape Education

“…For instance, Orietta Zanato Orlandini identified three principal functions of landscape in the classroom: (1) the hermeneutical function, where landscapes are read and their signs decoded, (2) the pragmatic function, where students learn to manage, plan and protect the territory and (3) social function, where students develop local identities while opening to "otherness," especially in contexts where there is increased migration [6]. Yet, it must be noted that current research on Landscape Education remain dominated by Euro-Western scholarly sources, ostensibly due to the ELC involving European countries [4,[7][8][9][10][11][12]. In European classrooms, Landscape Education has been weaved into the curriculum through, for example, including content in Social and Natural Sciences subjects which teach students about natural and anthropized landscapes [11]; drawings and questionnaires to get students to recognize the landscapes and around them and subsequently evaluate their views, experiences and feelings towards these landscapes [7,13]; through fieldwork trips to landscape sites [14]; and collaborative learning across multiple Universities, using technologically enhanced learning platforms to critically engage with the theories, methods, ethics and practices of participation in landscape planning [15].…”