CAREER: Enabling Transformational Service-Learning in Engineering through Critically Reflexive Practice

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This CAREER project will substantially help improve the education of future engineers by preparing them to address societal challenges in meaningful ways. Undergraduate engineering coursework is heavily focused on technical preparation. However, in addition to technical skills, engineers should learn how to understand and address the needs and perspectives of the people who will be impacted by their technical solutions. This project will address this need by focusing on service-learning, that is, courses where engineering students work with communities outside of the university to help resolve a local challenge. The great benefit of service-learning is that students can learn to be socially responsible engineering professionals while positively impacting local communities. However, in practice, service-learning is very difficult which can lead to harmful impacts on the student and community participants. When not performed carefully, these courses can teach students to dismiss community perspectives and treat communities as laboratories rather than as collections of people with unique social, cultural, and historical backgrounds. Within this problem, this project will help ensure that the way engineering service-learning courses are taught maximizes benefits for all participants through transformational service-learning. More specifically, this project will investigate how instructors develop the skills, attitudes, and knowledge they need to design and implement transformational service-learning. To pursue transformational service-learning, it is necessary that educators acknowledge the substantial role that race, power, and privilege play within this pedagogy. To support educators’ understanding of the role of these factors in service-learning, a promising approach involves first developing educators’ critical reflexivity: the process by which an educator creates an internal dialog and evaluates their own positionality to articulate its impact on educational processes and outcomes. This project will engage the framework of critical reflexivity, addressing research questions that explore (1) service-learning engineering educators’ descriptions of their assumptions about service-learning and their own positionalities within this context, (2) the way these assumptions and positionalities impact their approaches to teaching service-learning, and (3) the impact that critical reflexivity has in supporting transformational service-learning outcomes. This investigation will begin with interviews, and findings will be used to engage educators from a community of practice that focuses on reflection and action to produce further knowledge. The results will inform the development, assessment, and validation of a short course and guidebook to propagate this new knowledge while also refining this project’s findings. Along with dissemination through publications and conferences, this propagation approach enables widespread impact of these outcomes by closely engaging potential adopters, thereby increasing the likelihood that they will pursue transformational service-learning. Through partnering with large networks of engineering and service-learning educators both nationally and internationally, these products will be used to promote a paradigm shift in engineering service-leaning towards impactful community-oriented approaches. This CAREER project will create new knowledge about (a) how SL engineering educator positionality and assumptions hinder and enable service-learning practice; (b) how critical reflexivity influences engineering educators’ adoption of approaches to elicit transformational service-learning; and (c) how engineering educators can develop service-learning coursework to achieve transformational impacts for social justice and equity across marginalized communities. Collectively, these outcomes will lead to the development of engineering civic-minded engineering citizens who equitably engage with local communities and are prepared for resolving complex societal challenges.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.