Working Across Disciplines and Chipping Away at Silos with SLCE: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Educating Science and Engineering Students

Abstract

A co-curricular approach to service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) designed to begin breaking through these institutional and personal silos that inhibit exchanges of knowledge between students, faculty and communities, is presented. This approach seeks to create a continuum of engagement and learning for students, faculty, and communities to redirect students and faculty away from the drive to solely produce a competitive product (or trophy) and toward an appreciation of the ongoing process of engagement. To construct this continuum, we draw on the idea of an intellectual apprenticeship. The students in this model serve as the apprentices, while the faculty, along with community partners and other colleagues, act as mentors in a guild of “artisans” dedicated to putting useful knowledge into action. We present the principles of engagement that underlay the entire process (respect, reciprocity and relationship), the stages of the apprenticeship, evidence that supports its effectiveness and challenges to the approach. The goal of the paper is to share the approach with the larger community so that others may borrow what they find useful and add what they believe to be missing to ultimately improve experiential education about SLCE for engineers and scientists.