2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Community-engaged engineering provides students with opportunities to connect technical learning to social impact, yet the ways students experience and understand such engagement remain underexplored. This study employed a phenomenographic research design to investigate the qualitatively different ways in which undergraduate engineering students experienced community-engaged projects. Phenomenography, rooted in a non-dualistic ontology and interpretivist epistemology, focuses on describing the range of conceptions within a group and their structural relationships, rather than quantifying prevalence. The goal was to identify categories of description that capture students varying conceptions of design, teamwork, impact, learning, and ethics, and to arrange them into an outcome space that reflects the developmental range of their experiences. Data were drawn from end-of-semester written reflections of 25 students, yielding over 20,000 words of text. These reflections served as the primary data source, functioning equivalently to interview transcripts by capturing participants’ focus of awareness in their own words. Analysis followed established phenomenographic procedures of familiarisation, condensation, comparison, grouping, articulating, labelling, and contrasting. The entire dataset was treated as a single pool of meaning, and categories were refined iteratively through peer debriefing and negotiated consensus to ensure trustworthiness. The analysis yielded five categories of description: (1) Conceptions of Impact (ranging from transactional deliverables to recognition of systemic barriers), (2) Conceptions of Design (from technical coding to co-defining solutions with partners), (3) Teamwork and Leadership (from task division to boundary-spanning facilitation), (4) Learning and Identity Development (from technical skills to civic identity), and (5) Awareness of Power and Ethics (from recognition of designer influence to responsibility for inclusion and equity). These categories were hierarchically structured in an outcome space that revealed a progression from technical and artifact-centered perspectives, through relational and collaborative orientations, toward systemic and civic-oriented ways of experiencing. The findings suggest that community-engaged engineering supports student development beyond technical competence, fostering relational collaboration, ethical awareness, and civic responsibility. Critical thresholds including partner engagement, usability testing, and leadership roles were pivotal in shifting students toward more complex understandings. By mapping these variations, this study demonstrates how phenomenography can illuminate developmental trajectories in engineering education and inform the design of curricula that integrate technical, relational, and civic dimensions of professional practice.