2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Engineering in Context learning community at Whatcom Community College seeks to welcome and onboard new engineering students with an integrated two-quarter cohort learning experience. This collaboration between engineering, mathematics, history, English, and physics faculty consists of a six-course curriculum that integrates contextualized precalculus, English composition, Pacific Northwest history, engineering orientation, and introductory problem-solving and computing skills. The program employs high-impact practices including place-based learning, community-engaged projects, and undergraduate research to motivate foundational skill development, emphasize social relevance, and develop students' engineering identity, sense of belonging, and academic readiness. The Historical Marker Project is a cornerstone of the learning community’s first-quarter curriculum drawing on a multidisciplinary approach to reveal the layers of the built environment, from a natural to an engineered shoreline. This quarter-long project seeks to engage students with one of the essential questions of the overarching learning community experience: “How does the engineered world affect how we live?”

The project begins in Week 2 with a field trip to the city’s waterfront, which is currently undergoing cleanup and re-envisioning of 137 acres of Bellingham’s downtown core as part of a long-term process of deindustrialization coinciding with the closure of the Georgia Pacific’s pulp, chemical, and tissue operations in 2007. The project culminates in Week 10 with a multi-media presentation evaluating aspects of the cumulative impacts of 150 years of development and alteration of an engineered shoreline. For the history portion, students do original research at the regional archives to identify changes to the landscape over time and evaluate historical sources to determine the causes of these alterations. In the process, students develop history course outcomes, including (1) analyzing primary and secondary sources to evaluate historical arguments for credibility, position, perspective, and relevance; (2) locating sources in their historical context; and (3) identifying the ways political economy have shaped land and resource use in the region. The blending of disciplines occurs in the latter half of the term when students write the story of a site using the methods of a historian while simultaneously using newfound math and engineering skills to analyze the system and create a visual representation. We share student feedback, reflections, and final assessment results demonstrating how skill acquisition in history, engineering, and mathematics can be woven together to foster connections between people and place while making the socially relevant connections crucial for students’ sense of belonging.