2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In early spring 2020, a group of international engineering and architectural graduate students from a Swedish technical university traveled to Kenya as part of a field study program. Like the groups before them over the past two decades, these students aimed to explore how their design skills could address the needs of marginalized communities in the Global South. Hailing from some of the wealthiest countries in the world and trained at elite universities, the group arrived in Nairobi with high expectations. However, just three and a half weeks later, they were abruptly forced to return to their home countries as the COVID-19 pandemic spread globally. Once back home, the students worked to develop online strategies to continue their collaborations with their Kenyan partners.

In adapting to this new situation, both the students and their Kenyan collaborators modified their co-design methods to bridge cultural and geographic distances while striving to implement decolonizing practices. This paper reflects on their experience using a combination of remote and in-person ethnographic techniques to create a case study on the long-term impact on the program’s curriculum. It seeks to answer several questions: How did this experience transform teaching and learning activities? Did it deepen the understanding of what constitutes effective collaboration? How can a comparative analysis of curricular experiences from pre-pandemic, pandemic, and post-pandemic periods provide new insights into the production and translation of engineering and design knowledge across different lived experiences?

This paper will qualitatively analyze how the value orientations about learning in the course were transformed in socially significant ways. To do this, it will use decolonizing frameworks to study engineering and design methods involving collaborations between experts from the Global North and community stakeholders in the Global South (Tunstall 2013). The analysis will also include a review of collaborative design theories that emerged from this experience and examples where these collaborations did not meet their intended goals (Escobar 2018). Through this approach, the paper aims to provide a case study that critically examines the assumptions, interdependencies, and value orientations underlying study abroad programs.