The Role of Community-Engaged Learning in Engineering Education for Sustainable Development

Abstract

This paper presents the positive experience of facilitating over 300 community-engaged engineering projects at an Irish higher-education institution. The projects are framed by a research orientation, a commitment to civic engagement, and building university–community partnerships, city–university partnerships, and partnerships with other official agencies, so that community users can provide real learning problems and contexts for students and researchers and benefit from the results. The paper highlights how well the outlined approach fits with the ideas of engaged scholarship and civic professionalism, and facilitates sustainable development. Students recognise the long-term value of engaging with community partners, understanding their future role in the community as engineers, reinforcing the idea that their work can respond directly to real needs in the community, while promoting the sustainability agenda at the same time. The approach presented in this study will not only enable the development of future models for embedding sustainability in engineering programs, but will also equip future engineers with transferable skills to ensure that sustainable development goes beyond university courses and is practiced every day.

Service-Learning as an Approach to Educating for Sustainable Development

“…Its implementation and institutionalization make it possible to respond to the real challenges of society, overcoming the elitism of merely theoretical approaches that lack practical applications [41,43]. It allows students to link academic learning with the needs of communities, thereby fostering civic engagement, promoting sustainable development [37,38,44,45], and transcending the walls of the classroom, with benefits for both students and communities [38,46,47]. Furco and Norvell [48] point out that key elements of service-learning are:…”

“…Higher education is responding to these challenges in a variety of ways: by prioritizing sustainability practices on campus, supporting research related to more socially engaged sustainability [13], increasing intentional and frequent engagement with sustainability issues by non-academic partners [17], and adapting curricula and pedagogical approaches to integrate sustainability into teaching [5,17,23,26,34]. As universities begin to engage with sustainable development and the needs of local and global communities, the importance of using new approaches, such as service-learning, to guide these endeavors becomes apparent [37][38][39][40][41]. Below, the literature on service-learning with regards to achieving sustainability is reviewed.…”

Involving Engineering Student in Community-Based Project: A Qualitative Study

“…Various research has been conducted to explore the appropriate educational approaches and processes to meet demands while eliminating gaps that occur, namely problem-based learning, project-based learning, innovation pedagogy, community-based learning, community-based research (Charosky et al, 2022;Goggins & Hajdukiewicz, 2022;Guo et al, 2020;Mebert et al, 2020;Mello-Goldner, 2019). As an example, in order to address the gap between theoretical and professional skills, problem-based learning or project-based learning approaches are widely implemented in education.…”

“…Other approaches employed to bridge the gap between education and community needs include community-based learning, community-engaged learning, and community-based research (Chen et al, 2020;Goggins & Hajdukiewicz, 2022;Mello-Goldner, 2019;Strand, 2000). These similar concepts allow students to express themselves, develop, and solve communities' inherent problems or engineering undergraduate program serves as a highly effective mean to fulfill the Washington Accord program requirement.…”

“…The introduction offers the students a comprehensive understanding of the role of engineering in the community and the identified issues in engineering practice. Furthermore, it incorporates an exploration of the impacts of engineering activity in economic, social, cultural, environmental, and sustainability (Goggins & Hajdukiewicz, 2022).…”