The 2010 Haiti Earthquake: Real-Time Disaster Inquiry in the Classroom

Civil engineering education commonly has classroom instructional strategies that include synchronous engagements between the instructor and the learner, but seldom has synchronous experiences between the learner and real-time external phenomena. As a consequence, student learning has historical sensibilities that may inhibit formulating opinions and conclusions from live events. This paper explores a natural disaster as a real-time course inquiry and its semester long immersion into the structures classroom at a private liberal arts university. A qualitative research design was deployed with a teacher’s story and participant observation study to document forty-four third-year architecture students studying an unfolding disaster event. The disaster was the 2010 Haiti earthquake. The findings indicate that students envision earthquake events as either a structural phenomenon with cultural implications or a cultural phenomenon with structural implications. The lessons learned from implementing a real-time disaster inquiry in the classroom are provided.