2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Community-based engineering design projects are a growing feature of engineering design education thought to support students’ development of sociotechnical ways of thinking, knowing, and doing in engineering. However, critiques of community-based engineering design projects abound. First, these experiences tend to occur in niche co-curricular activities in which students already engaged in sociotechnical design thinking and practices self-select into participating in community-based design learning experiences, thus allowing other engineering students to graduate without these meaningful learning experiences. Second, when implemented in co-curricular activities, they tend to be cost-prohibitive to low-income students and students from historically excluded backgrounds. Finally, research suggests these projects tend to be exploitative and extractive, often leaving community partner organizations and community members without the benefits of the projects.

To address these critiques, educators are increasingly implementing community engagement in course-based design projects. However, the literature on promising practices for developing projects that empower communities is limited, particularly as it pertains to international partnerships that might foster important learning outcomes. In this practitioner-oriented paper we report on our experiences developing and implementing a course-based, community-centered engineering design abroad project with community partners in Cartagena, Colombia. Drawing on three years of engagement with community members, data from student interactions with community members, and reflections from instructors and community partners, we describe affordances, and barriers, related to community engagement, community empowerment, and student learning. Specifically, we divide this paper into three sections: (a) student, instructor, and administrator epistemology, (b) opportunities and barriers for facilitating cultural learning, and (c) areas for future research and practice on development community-engaged design learning activities.

Student, Instructor, and Administrator Epistemology

Due to space limitations, we describe one area of the paper.

In this paper, we argue that student, instructor, and administrator epistemic frames for developing and implementing design abroad projects that both support students’ learning and elevate community empowerment, are a key barrier to important sociotechnical design outcomes.Specifically, we describe the dominant epistemology of engineering design education that permeates course design, community engagement, and ultimately, the outcomes of university-community partnerships. For example, students in our data struggled to reconcile institutionally valorized American cultural assumptions (e.g., the Center for Disease control as the authority on knowledge regarding public health) with local cultural knowledge (e.g., that community members in Cartagena would not regard the CDC as an epistemic authority). We acknowledged similar barriers in instructors and administrators who routinely asked community partners to adopt American administrative practices. However, we contend that these barriers, once acknowledged, offered students and instructors important opportunities for learning which we will address in the full paper. We will conclude this paper by describing areas for future educational research. In doing so, we argue for both paradigmatic, as well as structural, changes to engineering design education, especially those that employ community-based design projects abroad.