Our Work

Community Engagement

How can civil and environmental engineering courses effectively focus on impactful development within a particular community while providing broader educational training to address grand engineering challenges, meet identified community needs, while considering lived experiences of people? We are working to:

Establish a Community of Practice for the proposed research.
Identify mutual areas of interest and create the materials for setting the context of the community so that all students can learn.
Develop curriculum for civil and environmental engineering courses that work synergistically with partnered communities.

Impact on Students

In what ways and to what extent do civil and environmental engineering students perceive our curriculum as useful for building engineering innovation? We plan to:

Teach course material developed with community partners.
Utilize an explanatory mixed-methods case study design to collect quantitative and qualitative data.

Impact on Faculty

What are STEM educators’ (especially faculty in civil and environmental engineering) perspectives on integrating local infrastructural and community contexts, and how do they utilize the knowledge gained within their enacted curriculum? We are hosting the following:

Hands-on workshop using community engaged pedagogy.
Faculty focus groups to explore how faculty describe their experience with the process of integrating community contexts with their curricula.