2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Work in Progress: Iterating Eco-Social Justice Learning Experiences Through Community-Partnered Capstone Design Projects

Presented at Community Engagement Division 3 - Engagement in Practice Lightning Round: Fostering Reciprocal Partnerships and Empowering Change

Capstone design is a critical culminating experience in the academic trajectory of all undergraduate engineering students. At the University of San Diego, each year a handful of engineering capstone design teams out of the several dozen across the college work on community-partnered projects. The projects are seeded and nurtured by efforts from a formalized university initiative, the Engineering Exchange for Social Justice. During the 2021-2022 academic year, the authors of this paper were instructors for the year-long, multidisciplinary engineering capstone design course. The course structure and timeline cater to traditional, corporate/industry-sponsored projects. Three out of ten teams across our two course sections worked on community-partnered projects. We sought to learn about the student experience for those working on the community project teams. Each team member completed a reflection assignment with specified prompts at the end of the fall and spring semester. We analyzed the reflections using inductive thematic analysis. We identified ‘Justice’ and ‘Connectivity’ as primary themes, which connect to sociotechnical proficiencies we hoped to develop in the students. However, the reflections also highlighted challenges and shortcomings of our current model. For this work-in-progress paper, we share our salient findings from each theme, as well as instructor observations and lessons-learned from this community project capstone model.

Authors

Dr. Marissa H. Forbes University of San Diego [biography]

Marissa Forbes, PhD is an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of San Diego. She is co-creator and co-leader of the Water Justice Exchange, a cross-campus, inter-community initiative fostering synergistic research, teaching and solutions for water challenges in the San Diego/Tijuana region. Dr. Forbes earned her MS and PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder in Civil (environmental) Engineering, and conducts research that aims to advance water justice and sustainability, as well as sociotechnical engineering education research. She previously served as the project manager and lead editor of the NSF-funded TeachEngineering digital library (TeachEngineering.org, a free library of K-12 engineering curriculum), during which she mentored NSF GK-12 Fellows and NSF Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) participants on the creation and publication of their original engineering curriculum. Dr. Forbes is a former high school physics and engineering teacher and a former NSF GK-12 Fellow.
Prof. Gordon D. Hoople http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2663-4664 University of San Diego [biography]

Dr. Gordon D. Hoople is an assistant professor and one of the founding faculty members of integrated engineering at the University of San Diego. He is passionate about creating engaging experiences for his students. His work is primarily focused on two ar

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