Using Service Learning to Engage American Indian Students in Engineering

Service learning opportunities in engineering education are growing. The most notable examples include the Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICs) program, which now has 17 participating universities around the world, and Engineers Without Borders (EWB), which boasts over 200 chapters working on 170 projects in 41 countries associated with engineering programs. Service learning experiences can enrich the education of all students, but have the potential of being especially valuable for women and under-represented minority students in engineering. The Service in Engineering for Reservations Via Education (SERVE) program at Montana State University, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, is designed to enhance successful programs we have in place to recruit, retain, and graduate American Indians in engineering, engineering technology, and computer science degree programs. Most of these successful programs were developed under the broader Designing Our Community program. With SERVE, we are leveraging our initial success with the Designing Our Community seminar for American Indian students by implementing a service learning component in the course. This service learning component gives students an opportunity to help solve a real-world problem with a community or service provider early in their engineering degree program. Early evaluation of our SERVE efforts provides evidence that a service learning experience for American Indian engineering students is contributing to progress toward our goals of recruitment, retention, and professional development for these students. American Indian students successfully completing a service learning course in 2008 persisted at a greater percentage (82%) than those students that did not take a course (71%). Persistence for our study is measured from Fall to Fall enrollment. In the future, engineering student visits to the various reservation communities could strengthen the relationships we are building with these communities. The service learning experience enhances student understanding of the real world value of engineering and how they could use their education to solve societal problems, including those on the reservations. Finally, working with people from the community on solving a problem gives students a better idea of what engineers do, and thus contributes to our goal of providing professional development opportunities for American Indian students.