2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Students being un-or under-prepared with the sociotechnical skillsets to approach community-engaged engineering courses can be detrimental to both student motivation and community outcomes. At X University (X), community-engaged engineering courses have been offered as stand-alones, leading several instructors to identify student lack of preparedness as a concern for relationships with community partners and effective course design. Although X had offered a Humanitarian Engineering (HE) Minor for a decade, there appeared to be a critical knowledge gap and instructors across multiple departments gathered to address this concern.
Students seeking the HE minor are required to participate in at least one community-engaged engineering course. Therefore, the initial step towards providing the structure for students gain relevant community-engagement skills and knowledge was to reassess the learning objectives of the HE Minor. The resulting list was edited and refined through discussion amongst faculty teaching HE courses and was then reviewed by additional faculty and staff at X and external collaborators within the HE landscape. The resultant learning objectives served as the basis for collaboratively identifying the mission, vision, and student outcomes that would guide the restructuring of the HE minor. An introductory Humanitarian Engineering course was developed and incorporated focusing on sociotechnical skills and fostering student self-awareness regarding their positionality in colonial contexts and power dynamics as it related to community-engaged design work.
Transferable learnings from this experience are how to a) collectively identify the vision and student outcomes for a program that spans departments and institutions and b) structure a scaffolded minor program to support student development as community-engaged practitioners. The next steps are to assess student outcomes using the intercultural development inventory (IDI) as students progress through the HE minor and to continue to create opportunities aligned with the program mission, vision, and student outcomes identified through this process.