A revolution in learning helps to transform communities

Triggered by the impact of the worst flood in Bangkok’s history on its campus and the surrounding neighbourhood, Siam University (SU) is transforming its learning model by developing a concept of learning through student engagement with the community on sustainability projects.

It is a transdisciplinary experiential approach which the rector believes could revolutionise higher education.

Established in 1965 as an engineering school, SU is today one of the leading comprehensive universities in Thailand with 15 schools and over 10,000 students from Thailand and overseas.

It adopted this new approach to learning somewhat by chance after Bangkok faced the worse ever floods in 2011, which flooded the 65,000 square metre property of the university.



“When the floods came, we had to protect the campus. We realised that if we pass the water out of the campus, it will go to many houses and residences of our community,” recalls Dr Pornchai Mongkhonvanit, president of SU, in an interview with University World News on its campus in Bangkok.

“Instead of doing that, I thought the best way was to do a sort of social contract with the community,” he says.

“At that time it was difficult to go to the supermarket, so we contacted the supermarket to have [the] university as community market, so people around campus could get what they needed like rice,” he adds. “We ordered the food and other necessities and let people come here. They used the toilets and bought some things.”

According to Mongkhonvanit, this idea has led to the university gradually refashioning itself as a real change agent to transform the community to address its socio-economic problems.

Under its policy of ‘Sustainable University, Sustainable District’, SU is moving towards including sustainability as a vision for all its schools with their target groups being the ‘3 Ss’ – students, staff and surrounding communities. With this policy, the university is giving special attention to activities within the campus as well as in the surrounding community.

In order to ensure that SU accomplishes its sustainability mission, a ‘Center of Sustainability’ was officially set up with Mongkhonvanit heading it.

He interprets ‘sustainability’ in the broader sense, as ‘sustainable development’ and sees SU’s role as contributing in ways relevant to its student and local community to the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), set out in Agenda 2030, the framework of 17 SDGs and the 169 targets within them. These represent an unprecedented common agenda for humanity and the planet, agreed by 180 world leaders.

“I think you can integrate the SDGs into every subject because it is like a scope [or framework] of learning,” says Mongkhonvanit.

He explains that this is because when we focus on just development, we might move faster, but development without considering, for instance, the environmental dimension or the social care dimension, will not be sustainable.

SU applies this approach on campus, in its community and across the world through international collaboration.

Within the campus, SU has committed itself to a ‘green and clean campus’ with no plastic and polythene use, reduction of paper use and recycled food and drinks packaging on campus, increasing the adoption of solar power and the development of a waste management plan for the university and the adjoining communities.

Locally, SU focuses student learning and academic research on solving urban challenges in the environs of its campus.

Internationally, SU leads the International Association of Universities’ (IAU) Higher Education Sustainable Development (HESD) cluster for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11: Sustainable cities and communities), that is coordinated by Mongkhonvanit.

The IAU cluster for each SDG seeks to promote international collaboration and exchange of good practice between a group of universities working towards that particular SDG. As lead institution for SDG 11, SU encourages collaboration and reports back on what different members of the cluster are doing each year.

One of SU’s key SDG 11 projects is about creating ‘healthy space’, aimed at managing space constraints to facilitate healthy living for the people in the community.

Bangkok is a metropolis of 10.72 million people and it faces a multitude of problems, including overcrowding, an ageing population, drugs and other social evils, etc. Thus, the city is a good laboratory for a university that wants to provide solutions to these problems.

Bridges and pass ways across the city have created communities that are infested with drug dealing, discarded drug syringes, violence and crime.

But working extensively as an urban laboratory, SU has transformed dangerous areas into safe ones, such as Phasi Charoen District near the university, which is seen as a role model now.

Mongkhonvanit says that the experience of working with the community during the 2011 floods taught them that “the community and university should work together”, especially in big cities like Bangkok. He points out that people who live near canals (one passes just next door to SU) have a lot of problems because living there is against the law.

“Sometimes in developing countries people are afraid of district authority staff and to talk with the police. But in the university, we say: ‘We want to work with you, we don’t want to fine you or punish you. Why don’t we work with you to find a solution?” he said.

This way, the university became the medium through which the community people could communicate with authority to solve their problems, “because we gained the trust [and] police also come later so we become the catalyst of the change and core of the transformation of the society”.

For five years, under the leadership of the faculty of nursing, students and staff from the faculty and the student union have worked with dedication on a project where they have experimented with alternative solutions to treating garbage in Khlong Bang Jak, which flows alongside the campus. A ‘living’ garbage trap was created to use in the canal to stop the water becoming polluted.

“Food security is another important area for the community,” says Yhing Sawheny, deputy director of international affairs and lecturer at SU.

“Teams [of students and staff] from the faculty of nursing helped to set up organic farms on 3,000 properties. We turned a dying, infested area into a garden of peace.

“The garden is close to the university. This area was very dangerous, but now people exercise, go for walks, have a gym in the community.

“There was a waste dump before near the campus. We turned it into a community recreational facility.”

Since 2019, SU has been working on a ‘Youth for Community Development’ project supported by the Government Savings Bank that includes 10 communities. The project aims not only to provide lifelong learning about savings, but also to provide assistance for the community’s economic needs.

‘Social living labs’

These communities serve as the university’s ‘social living labs’ where the students and staff will have real-life experience and the communities will benefit economically, socially and ecologically.

In one such community, SU staff and students helped them to prepare special Thai dishes with produce from home-grown farms and introduced them to home-stay based tourism as an income generator.

Mongkhonvanit believes that the model of teaching students content in classrooms for four years is now outmoded.

“What we should teach the students is the skill to solve the problems, skill to work with the community,” he argues. “I believe that it’s the skill not the content that universities should provide.”

The university must be a laboratory for the community, he explains. “When they have a problem with the quality of the water, we can test the water and find a solution. So we try to expand the scope of learning [so that it is] not only memorising, not only making the research or writing a paper, but to test what we think and solve the problem.”

Thailand is rapidly becoming an ageing society and SU developed a scheme with the Thai Health Promotion Foundation called ‘time banking’, where young people help the aged citizens in the community and get ‘time credits’ that they can bank in an account to be used when they grow old themselves. It is a barter system without the involvement of money.

“We also try to transform what we call the old people’s home. Normally they have only a room and are just left there with nothing to do. We are trying to turn that into a small sustainable town where older people not only look after their health, but have a small garden they can walk in and some kind of relaxation space to have a better life,” Mongkhonvanit says.

SU is dedicated to lifelong education and their main library opens daily to the university’s students and staff and the public.

Transforming the education model

Mongkhonvanit tells University World News he is trying to fundamentally change the system of university education, where textbooks are recommended to be studied and then students are tested on that knowledge.

“I like to change that because I have realised [using] only the textbook cannot be very relevant to the work and life after they graduate,” responded Mongkhonvanit.

Coming from an engineering background, he points out that, for example, in the training of a civil engineer there are flaws in the current education system.

It will teach only the skills of civil engineering. But to build a building you need to understand the needs of the ones who are going to use your building. You need to know the law. Then you need to know the environment, otherwise it may not be a good building anymore.

Mongkhonvanit believes that the young generation today knows how to find knowledge by going to Google or whatever, and they rarely read textbooks.

“What they really need is the skill to solve the problem and the skill to transform the place they are in, whether it’s a community or an organisation they belong to,” he argues.

“So, this why I think community is a good level for teaching and learning for students.”

Mongkhonvanit believes going into the community and learning would be more fun than what it is today in university-based learning.

“If you are a student and want to solve the real problems and you try to learn more skills, like negotiation skills and also project management skills, I think it will be good, because at the end we have to assess the student as well. What they have done for the community, what type of skill, what type of competency they have learned.”

New model for teaching

Mongkhonvanit believes the need of the hour is to go back to universities where many disciplines can work together rather than in siloes.

“Students right now are lifelong learners and they can study by themselves [with digital technology],” he argues.

“They want the freedom to learn and the freedom to learn what they like to know. Instead of assessing the contents, in the future we need to assess the competency, assess the skill of the student.”

Mongkhonvanit says through leading the IAU cluster on sustainable cities (SDG 11), SU is working with other higher education institutions to try to develop common projects where universities from different continents collaborate to examine what problems big cities face and engage with communities and share experience of addressing the issues.

Other cluster members include universities in Japan, Indonesia, South Africa, Bangladesh, Thailand and Lithuania.

“The impact is that we can learn from each other,” he tells University World News, so that when we talk about big cities, we can learn for instance that in Tokyo they are doing this and elsewhere they are doing that, and we can use that experience to improve what we are doing now.”

Developing a whole-institution approach

University World News asked Mongkhonvanit if the cluster system is trying to encourage a whole-institution approach.

“Yes, I think it has to be a whole institution approach to the SDGs, because if you only do it, for instance, from the civil engineering department, it will not succeed.”

From his own experience of leading Siam University, he says adopting such an approach involves two steps.

“First, you have to look at the mission of the university, because sometimes it will be aligned, and sometimes not.

“Second, you will have to decide on your education system, your learning system as well, and produce your own model.”

SU’s mission affirms “sustainable development as the most important goals [sic] in developing the faculty members, learners, and surrounding communities”.

At SU the learning system is based on ‘models’ geared to enabling interdisciplinarity. A student can choose a course from one department, say civil engineering, and another course from a different department, perhaps law.

In this case the student learning civil engineering can usefully learn about the law about the environment, or if they took a programme on health they could look at health-related issues around engineering projects, or if they took one on managing energy they could relate that to civil engineering and so on.

“We try to combine two to three courses in a model and after you learn the theory, you have to undertake a project involving people outside the university.”

These are projects co-designed with the community, with the professor acting just as a coordinator, which are assessed by the external stakeholders and people from the industry “so that we can ensure that students have the skills appropriate to that particular model”, Mongkhonvanit explains.

He says this is not like the traditional system of learning; it has to be “transdisciplinary” and “complete” in the sense of combining teaching, learning and experience culminating in completing a real-life project.

Real-life experience includes grappling with problems such as adhering to a budget and finding ways to be sustainable for the long term, not just the lifespan of the student’s academic project.

Some projects involve the university working with district officials and law enforcement agencies as well as the community itself. “You don’t have to do everything yourselves; others will work with you and [over time] more and more projects will come to the university. This is our experience,” Mongkhonvanit says.

For students this ‘model’ approach means they learn many aspects of how to implement a real-life project or enterprise. For instance, if they want to open a small coffee shop, they might have to learn about advertising, food technology, interior design as well as choose the ‘model’ that is right for what they want to learn.

Above all, Mongkhonvanit thinks integrating this interdisciplinary experiential learning fully into the education system is the right route to take “because students nowadays don’t want to just listen to lecturers; they can already find what they would like to know from various means”, including online.

“We like them to achieve something and have a chance to shape their own future.”

To listen to an audio interview with Mongkhonvanit on Siam University’s whole-institution approach to addressing sustainable development and planetary health, listen here.

For more details on Siam University’s SDGs activities, see this report on the IAU Higher Education for Sustainable Development site.

To find out more about how universities are contributing to achieving the SDGs, visit the University World News SDGs Hub.

To learn more about how universities are helping to make cities and communities more sustainable, visit the Sustainable Cities section of the University World News Global Challenges micro-hub here.

For more details on IAU clusters, see the IAU website here.

To let University World News know about your whole-institution approach to achieving the SDGs or social transformation and planetary health, please email Brendan O’Malley at brendan@universityworldnews.com.