Background: Scholars agree that reciprocity is a cornerstone of service-learning and community engagement (SLCE); however, engagement with this concept varies widely in practice and across disciplines. To enhance the potential of SLCE to fulfill its promise for societal impact, engineering education must understand how reciprocity is achieved,…

The unique characteristics of the training needed for today's biomedical engineers can represent a challenge in curriculum design. Practical experiential learning for biomedical engineering undergraduates is important to prevent under-developed professional skills. In this teaching tips article, we provide an example of how to incorporate…

At the Peugeot Center for Engineering Service in Developing Communities at Lipscomb University, seventeen years of experience have provided the foundation for a program that creates lasting impact. In comparison to other service learning or humanitarian engineering programs, the Peugeot Center is unique in that it achieves substantial impact on…

As global engineering education projects and programs are initiated, too often social outcomes and long-term impacts are assumed to be positive. This is particularly true for sustainable development projects, which often have an inherent assumption of positive transformation through engineering solutions. We argue that a focus on technical…

Displaced learners, uprooted because of conflict, poverty, or other major traumas, are often shut out of opportunities to learn engineering. At the same time, fragile contexts demand engineers' expertise, but experts and their engineered solutions are often called in from outside the community. In this article, we examine engineering learning as a…

Campus-community partnerships are integral to community-engaged learning, service-learning and similar pedagogies that extend project-based learning beyond the classroom into "real world" communities. Community-engaged courses have increased in prevalence in engineering education. Evidence suggests that they are effective at connecting…

This paper examines how the structural features of engineering engagement programs (EEPs) are related to the nature of their service-learning partnerships. "Structure" refers to formal and informal models, processes, and operations adopted or used to describe engagement programs, while "nature" signifies the quality of…

In this article I analyze postcolonial theory as a critical framework to improve understanding of global service-learning (GSL) partnerships. Although research on student learning outcomes from participation in GSL has grown dramatically over the past decade, scholarship on community outcomes and perspectives in GSL continues to lag. Just as…

There is a growing demand in the US for more trained engineers, yet attrition rates from university engineering programs are high and diversity in engineering is low. Few resources have been dedicated to the improvement of freshman engineering courses even though freshman students have the highest rates of attrition. Through a synthesis of the…

Given the tormented history of development projects around the globe and the fact that global service learning and engineering-for-development often engages students in development interventions, it is critically important to explore the impact of global service learning projects and partnerships not only on student learning, which has received…

Interdisciplinary programs in schools of social work are growing in scope and number. This article reports on collaboration between a school of social work and a school of engineering, which is forging a new area of interdisciplinary education. The program engages social work students working alongside engineering students in a team approach to…

This study explored the perspectives of community organization representatives and community residents about a partnership between a College of Engineering and a rural municipality in Nicaragua. The intended community outcomes described by university participants during interviews corresponded with tangible project outcomes, such as access to…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to focus on a number of initiatives in civil engineering undergraduate programmes at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG) that allow students to complete engineering projects in the community, enabling them to learn by doing. Design/methodology/approach: A formal commitment to civic engagement was…

Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) was created by Purdue University (Indiana) School of Electrical and Computer Engineering to broaden the education of engineering students by the use of an extended service-learning experience integrated into the engineering curriculum. EPICS provides local community service organizations with…