2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Programs aimed at community engagement efforts at X University have been offered since the early 2000’s, which aimed at providing engineering students opportunities to use their technical skills with international engagement. While immensely popular with students and marketing pamphlets, a recent concentrated effort within the community-engaged engineering courses has been undertaken to shift away from models that solely focus on delivery of technological solutions. Which often failed to integrate complex contextual elements into the pedagogical course design and resultant student centric design process.

Our course design shifted towards holistic and ethical engagement highlighting the programmatic shift from “service learning” to “community engaged learning” and challenging students to reflect on their motivations and positionality as individuals and engineers. This shift aimed to forge international and local partnerships that focus on community engagement and student learning through intensive planning, the establishment of trust, and values-centered relationships. Through utilization of human centered design theory and establishment of long-term partnerships that reposition student centric engagement courses have shifted to partnership structure that acknowledges strengths and limitations and centered value to each stakeholder. While models like this exist across the community development landscape there are challenges on how to integrate this into engineering course dynamics. Numerous researchers and academic folks have identified these challenges, but a critical gap still exists with the application of said “best practices”. This paper aims to highlights the success and challenges seen throughout this transition when these concepts are put into practice to build effective partnerships at the local and international level. The overarching aim of this work is to share a proposed process of engagement for others interested in offering community engaged learning opportunities.