Lessons from an interdisciplinary community engagement course for engineers

Many higher education institutions have robust Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) curricula and strong outcomes for training technologists; far fewer have similarly strong mechanisms for training those STEM majors in community engagement and exposing them to perspectives on culture, history and power.

An interdisciplinary course, Engineering with Purpose: Community Engagement and Emerging Technologies, sought to address this gap at Georgia Tech. The course was collaboratively designed by students and faculty; its purpose was to equip students to be technologists who engage residents’ expertise and lived experiences in developing technological innovations that will impact their communities. 

Here, we share three key lessons from the pilot semester. 

Lesson 1: Course development and execution should be interdisciplinary and collaborative

Engineering students were empowered to co-design a course that explored themes they felt were conspicuously absent from their course requirements – such as understanding implicit bias, collaborating with communities and analysing engineering mindsets. Over three years, 10 students from STEM fields contributed to creating the course syllabus, developing activities and crafting learning outcomes, guided by an interdisciplinary group of faculty partners and a faculty mentor at the Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education (Score). A grant-funded programme that paired engineering majors with community partners from different disciplinary backgrounds on partner-identified projects was also an important test bed for course themes and objectives. 

• Active, flipped, micro, virtual learning: a toolbox for interdisciplinary teaching
• Developing interdisciplinary courses for tomorrow’s scholars
• Interdisciplinarity makes us greater than the sum of our parts

The course was taught for the first time in spring 2024 by a collaborating instructor pair – Score’s associate director, Ruthie Yow, who has a background in history and anthropology, and the centre’s graduate research assistant, Bettina Arkhurst, then a PhD student in mechanical engineering. The lead student author of this piece, Sophia Ebbutt, a civil and environmental engineering major, was the teaching assistant. Having an instructor team representing engineering and the humanities created a strong pedagogical foundation and a class atmosphere that welcomed students from all disciplines into productive reflection and dialogue. 

Lesson 2: Invite and reflect on expertise from outside academia 

Our course drew on multiple frameworks and forms of expertise to understand and centre local knowledge, and cultural and historical context. The instructors recruited guest presenters – mostly community-based experts working at the intersection of environmental justice and emerging technologies – from Score’s network of community and academic partnerships. A presenter who leads a community health initiative focused on air quality in a historically Black neighbourhood described organising community members to participate in a radon detection programme in their homes. They explained leveraging the trust they had built among residents through years of community events and programmes.  

One field trip visited a local community centre to learn about the community organiser it was named after, Rosel Fann. Like early environmental justice activists in Warren County, North Carolina, which students had learned about, Fann was a community organiser who never held elected office but had enormous local influence. Through Fann’s story, students were exposed both to the function of Atlanta’s unique neighborhood planning unit system – which Fann used to advocate for the families and children in her unit – and to the impact of Black residents like Fann who battled systemic injustice to create better outcomes for their neighbours. 

Although much of the relevant scholarship focuses on community engagement by professionals in public health, technology is also a key field in which building trust between researchers and communities is critical. It is essential for technologists to develop approaches that sustain mutually beneficial partnerships – such as focusing on community assets, not deficits; listening first and learning about local culture and history; and creating mechanisms within a project for shared decision-making, ensuring community members a permanent “seat at the table”. 

Lesson 3: A discussion-based format benefits both students and instructors

Students in the pilot semester of the course were equally divided between STEM and non-STEM majors. They learned from one another both informally and through the “teach-back” format of final presentations. Students’ takeaways from the course suggested that they interacted with the material in ways specific to their backgrounds and career ambitions. An economics major discussed the critical role of strong community engagement in developing technologies that reduce risk and enhance prosperity in communities, while a public policy major described the contingent nature of “ethics” – including ethical decisions regarding “acceptable” harms. A nuclear engineering major called out the negative effects of reductionism and technological determinism, describing how engineering education rarely highlights the myriad ways technology is integrated into and influences our social world. 

Student feedback was also helpful for this course’s instructors and others interested in designing community engagement courses in STEM settings. Students described the importance of understanding engineering’s limitations, respecting community knowledge and always looking for perspectives beyond your own. They all suggested that a willingness to question knowledge and authority – and to reimagine processes that have historically excluded community participation – will lead to more ethical and inclusive technological solutions. These insights can help shape future iterations of this course and courses that seek to integrate interdisciplinary approaches and community engagement training into STEM education. 

Ruthie Yow is associate director of the Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education at Georgia Tech. Sophia Ebbutt (civil and environmental engineering major), Angela Iyabor (economics), Kayla Kessler (business administration), Lucas Morrison (nuclear and radiological engineering) and Alex Simons (public policy) are all students at Georgia Tech.

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