The Evolution and Characteristics of emergency management disciplines in the United States

Author: Peng Jianjun, Duan Chunmei

At present, the uncertainty of globalization is prominent, and various black swan events and gray rhino events are intertwined, which aggravates social risks, and also confirms the judgment and anxiety of German scholar Ulrich Beck in his 1986 book "Risk Society". Strengthening the construction of emergency management disciplines is an important foundation for cultivating management talents and building national emergency response capabilities. The construction and development of emergency management disciplines in the United States has a certain representativeness, which has aroused extensive discussion among scholars.

Major emergencies promote the development of disciplines

The earliest understanding of emergency management in the United States dates back two centuries. In 1803, a series of fires swept through the port city of Portsmouth in New Hampshire, and in response to the disaster, Congress passed the first ever national disaster law. In the decades that followed, portsmouth's imprint led to an ad hoc approach to emergency management. By the middle of the 20th century, the U.S. Congress had dealt with a series of disasters, such as the 1871 Chicago fire, the 1900 hurricane in Galveston, Texas, and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. A series of large-scale hurricanes and earthquakes in the 1960s and 1970s focused public attention on relief from natural disasters. The Federal Disaster Assistance Administration responded significantly to Hurricanes Kara, Alaska, San Fernando, and Agnes, and was soon followed by laws, most notably the Disaster Relief Act of 1974, which established the procedure for the president to declare national disasters. The Three Mile Island nuclear accident of 1979 made it all the more urgent to centralize federal emergency response capabilities. That same year, President Jimmy Carter signed an executive order establishing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to assume responsibility for civil defense.

The U.S. emergency management discipline originated from the Emergency Management Academy (EMI) and the National Emergency Education and Training Base (NETC) established by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, initially to establish emergency education courses and applied training, and then gradually moved from practical training to higher education. In 1983, the University of North Texas established the nation's first undergraduate degree program in emergency management. In 1994, the Federal Emergency Management Agency promoted the Emergency Management Higher Education Program, which was established to "encourage and support the dissemination of hazard, disaster, and emergency management-related information at colleges and universities across the United States." Originally created, there were only four U.S. universities offering emergency management programs — one bachelor's degree program and three certificate programs — and the mission of the program was "to serve as the nation's leading focal point for higher education in emergency management, to promote specialization in the field through educational efforts, and to contribute to a more resilient nation by creating a team of professional emergency managers." After the "9/11" incident in 2001, emergency management education in the United States showed a spurt of development, and the government began to actively promote the establishment of a public safety emergency education system centered on "disaster-proof communities", and attached great importance to emergency education, and successively set up emergency management, homeland security, anti-terrorism disaster reduction, corporate crisis management and other majors in many colleges and universities. According to the 2021 FEMA Higher Education Program Report, as of January 2021, 269 higher education institutions in the United States have offered 684 emergency management-related programs.

Features of emergency management education

The cultivation of emergency management education in the United States has the characteristics of ability-based and tailored to needs. The Department of Emergency Management has a doctoral, master's, bachelor's, and associate degree, and in addition, a variety of professional training programs for emergency management courses. The goals of degree development at each level are different, for doctoral degrees, requiring creative research skills and a deep and breadth of knowledge of emergency management literature and research methods in order to engage in teaching, research and policy work in emergency management; for master's degrees, requiring a high level of understanding of emergency management, improving problem-solving skills, enhancing, enriching or otherwise expanding emergency management knowledge to serve those with supervisory or leadership functions in emergency management; for bachelor's degrees, It is required to study according to the basic knowledge required for the emergency management profession, understand the key theories of emergency management, and cultivate the ability to communicate and cooperate effectively with departments and communities at all levels; for the associate degree, as a supplement to the professional and professional goals of other disciplines, it is required to be familiar with the core knowledge of emergency management and pay attention to the cultivation of professional literacy ability.

The curriculum of emergency management education is mainly cutting-edge and scientific. According to the 2018 FEMA Higher Education Program Report, emergency management curriculum is ranked by practicality, such as national accident management systems (NIMS), technology and emergency management, disaster response and management, homeland security and emergency management, building communities with resilience, hazards, disasters and U.S. emergency management, etc. Overall, the most commonly used course is the National Accident Management System. At the postgraduate level, the most common courses are the social dimension of disasters, national accident management systems, technology and emergency management. These emergency management courses are characterized by the following three main aspects. First, the curriculum is more hierarchical, and different course completion plans are set up for different degrees. Second, the curriculum is more abundant. Emergency management-related courses include specialized courses offered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, standard courses developed for the associate degree group, and remote self-study courses in emergency management to meet the needs of different groups to the greatest extent. Third, the curriculum is more specialized. According to the 2020 FEMA Higher Education Program report, the related majors of emergency management in the United States include public health and medical treatment, homeland security, emergency management, etc., and the courses set according to the major are disaster risk management, homeland security and emergency management, etc. The curriculum fully demonstrates the professional characteristics of emergency management.

The teaching method of emergency management education reflects the characteristics of students as the main body and the unity of knowledge and action. The U.S. Department of Emergency Management educates students based on a wealth of academic knowledge within its discipline, including risk, preparedness, response, mitigation and recovery, among others, as well as a range of sub-topics related to these areas. In addition to traditional classroom teaching, case studies, discussions, etc., the teaching methods of emergency management disciplines in the United States are very diverse, including a large number of modern and open teaching methods, such as classroom lectures, group planning meetings, exercise-based training, virtual desktop exercises, etc. Emergency management students can also work with local communities, volunteer agencies, and participate in a variety of projects based on their interests. The hands-on teaching approach combines teaching with the "real world", providing students with the opportunity to apply knowledge and improve their skills, which is more conducive to the realization of teaching goals.

The construction of teachers in emergency management education focuses on practice-oriented, while at the same time focusing on both practice and integration. The U.S. emergency management discipline has very strict requirements for the construction of the teaching staff, taking the exercise control and simulation courses provided by the Emergency Management College as an example, and its contract lecturer standard document requires that the applicant must be a master's degree or above recognized by higher education academic institutions such as public administration, education, emergency management, public health, emergency medicine, fire science, social science, etc., or at least in the local, state and federal governments on the design, development, implementation of community emergency management exercises, Three years or more of experience in assessing and improving corrective action planning, preferably five years of experience in exercise project management, emergency management, emergency services, and direct responsibility for exercise project planning in a single or multiple jurisdictions. At the university level, teachers of emergency management disciplines can generally be divided into four categories: tenured, tenure-track, full-time non-tenured, and part-time. According to the survey of teacher types in related projects in the 2018 FEMA Higher Education Program Report, there are 575 tenured teachers in emergency management disciplines, 295 quasi-employed teachers, 190 full-time non-tenured teachers, and 1442 part-time teachers in the United States, with the largest proportion of part-time teachers. It can be seen that emergency management education in the United States relies heavily on part-time teachers, and the reason is that most of the part-time teachers are staff of relevant departments, have long-term emergency management work, and have rich practical experience in emergency management, which can not only provide theoretical support for the cultivation of talents in emergency management disciplines in the United States, but also provide practical learning guidance for them. (Peng Jianjun, Duan Chunmei)

Source: China Social Science Network