Enhancing construction education with contextual service learning

Recent calls to reform engineering education place emphasis on applied math and science within the broader context of globalization, economics, the environment, and society. To solve these complex problems, interdisciplinary approaches are required and demand additional teamwork skills of new graduates. While this vision for the future is well documented in The Engineer of 2020 and the ABET engineering accreditation criteria, many engineering faculty are at a loss for how to cultivate and assess these skills in students, particularly when the problem is viewed as adding new content to already packed degree programs. The Center for Leadership in Construction in the Myers-Lawson School of Construction at Virginia Tech provides an educational program that combines classroom learning with authentic field experiences. The program responds to the demands for integrating technical and social domains in a multi-disciplined, globally sensitive paradigm. The course that illustrates the efforts of the program is "Sustainable Construction in the Global Village". The course focuses upon public health infrastructures in resource poor countries and engages students to engineer in context by working in highly complex socio-technical systems that depend on humans for operations and maintenance. Student teams develop iterative design and construction solutions for community identified needs and then build their projects in country. For the course, hygiene and sanitation were the themes for projects. These included a water-storage and distribution system, a hand washing station, secure trash receptacles and school grounds pathways. Design considerations included the use of local materials, ease of use and sustainability, as well as operations and maintenance. The students developed designs and construction plans that detailed the materials required, quantity and cost estimates, a project schedule, a resource utilization plan and a daily safety plan. This paper provides a background on service learning, describes the course development and implementation, highlights the impact this experience had on the students, presents qualitative assessment data from the experience and illustrateshow other programs can participate in such learning experiences.