2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This study explores how relationships and affect influence students' learning and engagement in community-based engineering projects. With a growing emphasis on integrating social, political, and technical dimensions in K-12 and undergraduate engineering education, this research investigates how high school students learn and engage in sociopolitical engineering by constructing a community garden. Using a relational learning framework, the study examines students' experiences in a project called Ashford Youth Community Garden (AYCG), where students from a diverse urban high school collaborated with their peers, teachers, and community members to design and build a garden in their schoolyard. Data was collected through interviews and focus groups with two students, Camila and David, who played leadership roles in the project. Findings reveal that students' emotional connections and relationships with the plants and their school community motivated sustained engagement and iterative design improvement, highlighting the importance of affect in engineering learning. The study suggests that facilitating engineering projects within students' own communities can foster meaningful sociopolitical engineering practices and promote deeper learning experiences. Additionally, it calls for a broader recognition of relational and affective dimensions in engineering education research and practice.