2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

ABET accreditation for engineering and technology programs expects that students consider and take professional responsibility for the impact of public health, safety, and welfare, as well as global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic factors in engineering decisions. To address these objectives, the engineering professor, Dr. Yanjun Yan, taught three types of courses in the past: (1) an on-campus, first-year seminar course in project-based learning for engineering and technology students; (2) a faculty-led trip offering a single engineering course in 2018; and (3) multidisciplinary co-led faculty trips with a sports management professor in 2019 and a history professor, Dr. Gael Graham, in 2023 featuring one engineering and one humanities-based course on the same trip. During the 2023 trip, the students from Western Carolina University visited Hiroshima University and teamed up with a class of English-speaking Japanese students, led by Dr. Russell Kabir, to engage in group activities that culminated in an engineering design exercise. The entire workshop was a highlight for both groups. Research literature suggests a gap in the reporting of multidisciplinary trips and their pedagogical components. Therefore, we present a process evaluation of trip implementations to examine transferable best practices for researchers and faculty-led student practitioners. Students submitted journals and responded to an IRB-approved follow-up survey about their learning experiences. Reflective student feedback from both multidisciplinary trips indicated that engineering students deepened their understanding of chosen topics in consideration of global, cultural, and societal factors, and that the non-engineering students enjoyed the visits more than they expected and overcame initial fears about engineering-related coursework, discovering engineering practices in many aspects of their social lives. Overall, the students gave positive feedback about the multidisciplinary trips and demonstrated achievement of the learning outcomes. In the future, the authors plan to continue collaborations to further integrate the course modules and regularly evaluate the effectiveness of interdisciplinary instructional design practices.