Social work and engineering: Lessons from a water filtration project in Guatemala

Abstract

International service learning (ISL) programs seek to facilitate community inclusion, but such participation can prove elusive. For technical projects, such ventures can undermine local leadership, generate mistrust in communities, and even create an aversion to technological solutions. In this article, we document how social work and engineering students collaborated to bring clean water to rural Guatemala, and demonstrate how we employed social work principles to address the myriad issues encountered in the project. We contend that the inclusion of a social work perspective, with its emphasis on relationships, can help mitigate some of the challenges ISL projects tend to encounter.

Participant responses to a water treatment intervention in rural Guatemala

“…As potential partners in international development projects, social workers are poised to continue this legacy through multisystem interventions and a relentless emphasis on culturally competent practice (Matthew et al., 2017). In particular, they can bring an essential person-in-the-environment perspective to projects in developing countries, such as Guatemala, where profound scarcities impinge on health, and where well-intentioned interventions to bring basic health-promoting services can go awry.…”

“…By all objective measures, these filters work. However, evidence from water sample tests and field observations indicated that some families did not use their filters—even though they recounted frequent use (Matthew et al., 2017). The project faced a typical sticking point in implementation— What motivates consumer use ?…”

“…We noticed how difficult it was to reconcile these perspectives because the actors held such different cultural lenses. The technical experts and their faculty administrators resided in the United States, spoke English, and functioned under different priorities and cultural contexts than their Guatemalan partners (Matthew et al., 2017). We could only imagine how the filter recipients, those furthest removed from the conversations, perceived the project.…”

Co-educating Social Scientists and Engineers through International Service Learning

“…There has long been a recognition that the traditional engineering curriculum, focused on development and communication of technical content, is failing to produce engineers who are prepared for the complexity and impact of their work in the world outside academia. This appears to manifest itself as an inability of students to function sensitively in foreign cultures [1], a lack of awareness of the influential role that engineers can have in affecting society [2] and developing and acting on the whole-problem definition, mindful of not only the technical issue but the surrounding social and economic context [3]. Mulder [4] reviewed the incorporation of sustainability into curricula, concluded that engineering education should train students beyond considering the technical intervention, to being able to facilitate the process of addressing sustainability problems and move towards trans-disciplinary learning.…”

“…While there are many examples of individual courses or sessions for SL or ISL ( [1], [15], [16], [17]), there are fewer examples of a full post-graduate, multi-disciplinary course that is built around the concept of ISL specifically related to engineering interventions in development.…”