Engineering and Sustainable Community Development (ESCD): Critical pedagogy in education for "Engineering to Help"

Over the past ten years, engineers and engineering students and faculty have increasingly turned their efforts toward "underserved" communities. Such efforts raise important questions. Is there anything problematic with wanting to help a community? How do engineers listen to a community? If invited, how do engineers work with a community? Wondering about questions like these in relationship to engineering courses, design projects, volunteer activities, or international assignments motivated us to develop a project in critical pedagogy entitled Engineering and Sustainable Community Development. Our project is a critical pedagogy, one aimed at enhancing students' knowledge, skills and attitudes to reflect on the historical and political location of engineering, question the authority and relevance of engineering problem-solving and design methods, and "examine their education, including learning objectives, the course syllabus, and the textbook itself" (Riley, 2008, p. 113). Specifically, our project is aimed at engineering education as it relates to a diversity of these efforts, which we call "Engineering to Help" (ETH). ETH initiatives often exist under names such as community service, humanitarian engineering, service learning, Engineers Without Borders (EWB), Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW) and Engineering World Health (EWH). There has been a blossoming of ETH-related programs in the US and abroad, as evidenced, for example, by the large number of EWB chapters in universities worldwide and the upsurge of engineering design courses and extra-curricular activities with ETH-dimensions and goals. At the same time, there is increasing questioning into and assessment of the processes and outcomes of such projects (e.g., Schneider, Lucena and Leydens, 2009; Nieusma and Riley, 2010). Engineers have, up to this point, rarely engaged in such critical questioning: generally, there is a lack of student- and faculty-friendly critical reflections of engineers' involvement in ETH work. The question arises: what critical reflections might emerge from learning about the history of engineers in development or about the complexity of engaging and listening to communities? To fill that void, we conducted historical, ethnographic and other investigations. The main outcomes of this project are a course and a book for engineering students, faculty and practitioners involved in courses, programs and projects related to ETH. Here we outline the main elements of this project and provide recommendations on where and how to use it in engineering curricula.