Engineering And Sustainable Community Development: Critical Pedagogy In Education For “Engineering To Help”

Over the past ten years, engineers and engineering students and faculty have increasingly turned their efforts toward “underserved” communities. Such efforts raise important questions. Is there anything problematic with wanting to help a community? How do engineers listen to a community? If invited, how do engineers work with a community? Wondering about questions like these in relationship to engineering courses, design projects, volunteer activities, or international assignments motivated us to develop a project in critical pedagogy entitled Engineering and Sustainable Community Development. Our project is a critical pedagogy, one aimed at enhancing students’ knowledge, skills and attitudes to reflect on the historical and political location of engineering, question the authority and relevance of engineering problem-solving and design methods, and “examine their education, including learning objectives, the course syllabus, and the textbook itself” (Riley, 2008, p. 113). Specifically, our project is aimed at engineering education as it relates to a diversity of these efforts, which we call “Engineering to Help” (ETH). ETH initiatives often exist under names such as community service, humanitarian engineering, service learning, Engineers Without Borders (EWB), Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW) and Engineering World Health (EWH). There has been a blossoming of ETH-related programs in the US and abroad, as evidenced, for example, by the large number of EWB chapters in universities worldwide and the upsurge of engineering design courses and extra-curricular activities with ETH-dimensions and goals. At the same time, there is increasing questioning into and assessment of the processes and outcomes of such projects (e.g., Schneider, Lucena and Leydens, 2009; Nieusma and Riley, 2010). Engineers have, up to this point, rarely engaged in such critical questioning: generally, there is a lack of studentand faculty-friendly critical reflections of engineers’ involvement in ETH work. The question arises: what critical reflections might emerge from learning about the history of engineers in development or about the complexity of engaging and listening to communities? To fill that void, we conducted historical, ethnographic and other investigations. P ge 15475.2 The main outcomes of this project are a course and a book for engineering students, faculty and practitioners involved in courses, programs and projects related to ETH. Here we outline the main elements of this project and provide recommendations on where and how to use it in engineering curricula. 1. Background of this project Our journey to ESCD began in a previous curricular experiment in humanitarian engineering. After receiving a large grant from the Hewlett Foundation in 2005 to create a program that would change the way we traditionally teach engineering to students, engineering and liberal arts faculty involved with the grant chose to create an initiative called “Humanitarian Engineering” (HE) without being aware of what the synthesis of these two words really meant. Most engineering faculty viewed HE just as “engineering for the common good” and assumed that engineers doing good had a fairly simple history. After all, if engineers with good intentions have always been around doing good for people in the same ways, why should they care about understanding their history? Slightly more suspicious of the term “humanitarian,” liberal arts faculty involved in this grant began a historical and philosophical exploration of the term under a NSF grant on Humanitarian Engineering Ethics (HEE). We learned about humanitarian medics and relief workers emerged in the 19 th century, became organized under the International Red Cross, played significant roles in WW II, but until the 1960s included no engineers. In short, the history of humanitarianism and the histories of engineering for most of the 19 th and 20 th centuries are not connected. In this historical journey, we came across Doctors without Borders (MSF), perhaps the oldest and most comprehensive approach to humanitarian work by a profession. It became clear that the very recent Engineers Without Borders (EWB), and other similar organizations, found inspiration in MSF yet were doing something very different. In short, most engineers that we work with wanted the label “humanitarian” yet they were doing something else: community development. If our engineering colleagues and students are doing community development, we owe it to them and to ourselves to understand the history of how engineers came to be involved in community development in the first place. Still under NSF funding, we made a thematic shift in our curriculum development from HE to ESCD. A multidisciplinary faculty team (engineering, anthropology, cultural studies, communication and rhetoric, STS, philosophy) began course development in the summer of 2008 and offered the first experimental course on ESCD in Spring 2009 (see section 8 below). The breath, depth and complexity of material needed to appropriately address sustainability, development, community and their relationships with engineering in just one course made us realize in Spring 2009 that we needed to write a textbook for engineering students and faculty involved in ETH courses and activities. Since that time three of us have P ge 15475.3 written the book Engineering and Sustainable Community Development, published by Morgan & Claypool in March 2010. We outline here the book content, which includes an account of students’ experiences in the ESCD course. Following the book’s structure, this paper begins by exploring the history of engineers’ involvement in community development, then contrasts design for industry with design for community. We also examine ways in which engineers do and should engage and listen to community members’ perspectives, an examination that includes two actual SCD case studies. Finally, we describe the course ESCD as well as the limitations and recommendations for this project. 2. Historical overview of engineers and development To understand the present and future possibilities and constraints for engineers involved in sustainable community development (SCD), we have traced episodes of the history of engineers’ involvement in development, from 18 th century colonial development to 21 st century SCD, and tried to answer the following questions: How did engineers first get involved in development? How have engineers been engaged in imperial, national, international, and sustainable development? What kind of historical, ideological, and institutional factors might have contributed to engineers’ complex engagement with the groups of peoples (tribes, communities, villages, etc.) that they are supposed to serve? To what extent might this history constrain engineers’ ability to effectively define problems and implement SCD solutions? Definitions of SCD center on “the importance of striking a balance between environmental concerns and development objectives while simultaneously enhancing local social relationships. Sustainable communities meet the economic needs of their residents, enhance and protect the environment, and promote more humane local societies” (Bridger and Luloff, 1999, p. 381). Due to the limitations of time and space in this paper, we have only outlined in Table 1 our historical findings: Table 1: A historical overview of engineers’ involvement in development and views of