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Chapter 18 - Community Engagement in Engineering Education as a Way to Increase Inclusiveness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2015

By
Christopher Swan ,
Kurt Paterson  and
Angela R. Bielefeldt
Edited by
Aditya Johri  and
Barbara M. Olds
Christopher Swan
Affiliation:
Tufts University
Kurt Paterson
Affiliation:
James Madison University
Angela R. Bielefeldt
Affiliation:
University of Colorado
Aditya Johri
Affiliation:
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Barbara M. Olds
Affiliation:
Colorado School of Mines
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Summary

Introduction

There has been a recent surge in community engagement (CE) efforts in engineering education. These efforts have involved a spectrum of academic avenues – from curricular to co-curricular to extracurricular – that cover community-based projects in local to global settings. For example, many CE experiences can be embedded within courses in the traditional pedagogical form of service-learning, although in many cases CE activities are implemented and/or facilitated by nonacademic organizations, such as Engineers Without Borders (EWB). These activities continue to undergo increasing levels of design, management, and assessment, the latter driven, in part, by the outcomes assessment requirements for ABET engineering program accreditation in the United States, but also because of apparent positive impacts to student participants. Previous studies indicate that the knowledge and skills gained by the students are at least on par with gains from traditional education models (e.g., see Bielefeldt, Paterson, & Swan, 2010). Additional attention also is being focused increasingly on the potential impacts of CE on student attitudes and identity (Paterson, Swan, & Guzak, 2012) as well as long-term impacts on students as they enter the professional ranks (Canney & Bielefeldt, 2012). It is in these areas that differences in the influence of CE may appear more profound, yet small numbers of student participants in various programs and a lack of coordinated assessment efforts provide limited evidence that such results exist. This chapter highlights the development of CE in engineering education and possible research endeavors that can be taken to shed new light on its potential impact.

Type
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Cambridge Handbook of Engineering Education Research , pp. 357 - 372
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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