Exploring how engineering students learn the process of problem identification for community development

Abstract

This paper focuses on how students learn to become culturally responsive engineers for development within a graduate-level engineering course entitled Sustainable Community Development (SCD). A new type of engineer is required for the ever-increasing global demands to address the problems of equitable access to energy, nutrition, shelter, clean water, sanitation, and many other basic human needs. Given this context, engineers will need to play a more critical role in meeting these demands around the world and in local, historically marginalized, and economically struggling communities. Therefore we believe that becoming an engineer means developing dispositions that view engineering solutions as an outcome of collaboration between community members, engineers, funding organizations, and many other stakeholders. The SCD course was specifically designed to address engineering solutions for sustainable human development and poverty reduction. We studied students as they moved across locations, namely the engineering classroom and the local non-profit situated within a low-income community, in order to better understand how students come to identify problems and subsequent engineering solutions. Using a person-centered approach to learning, we focused on two students' experiences as they grappled with the process of problem identification within other communities, prior to developing engineering solutions. We concentrated on how students reorganize knowledge across contexts (the classroom and the community) as a basis for understanding learning. Specifically, we examined how these students negotiated the elements of problem identification including: moving from an abstract understanding of problem identification in the classroom into the situated understanding in the community, collaboration with a community partner, and managing goals between the classroom and the community. © American Society of Engeneering Education, 2013.