Educating Socially Responsible Engineers Through Critical Community-Engaged Pedagogy

Abstract

Service or community engaged learning has gained momentum as a strategy for developing engineering students’ professional skills while facilitating engagement with the real-world complexities of engineering problem-solving. Along with other critical scholars of engineering education, we argue that embedding social justice frameworks into engineering education, including sensibility around difference, power, and privilege, is required in order for engineering to meet the great sustainability and equity challenges of our time. This paper investigates how social justice course content and community engaged learning experiences can change engineering student attitudes toward civic engagement and social responsibility. We also explore how such content increases interest in engineering among students underrepresented in the field. Using pre-/post-survey data and focus group discussions, we conducted a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of student experience in an advanced undergraduate engineering course at a public research university that integrated social justice content with hands-on community engaged projects. Our analysis of survey results show that (1) students placed greater importance on justice-oriented civic engagement and socially responsible engineering after completing the course; (2) women and underrepresented racial/ethnic groups demonstrated greater interest in community engaged projects, and women indicated a greater interest in engineering at the end of the course than men; and (3) participation in a community engaged project also increased students’ interest in engineering, humanized problems that might have traditionally been construed as technological, and deepened the value students placed on non-technical forms of knowledge and their sense of moral and ethical responsibilities.

1. Introduction

Today’s engineers are asked to help resolve complex global challenges that are fundamentally social as well as technological in the context of an increasingly connected but unequal world. From where we write, in the United States, sustainability challenges related to the provision of clean drinking water, the mitigation of climate change, and restoration of urban infrastructure, for example, were identified in 2008 as “Grand Challenges” of the profession that are inherently political and economic as much as technological (National Academy of Engineering, 2017). More recently, in fall of 2025, the World Federation of Engineering Organization’s general assembly and congress met in Shanghai under the theme of green futures and focused on “the pivotal role of engineering technologies in addressing climate change” and “enhancing human well-being” (WFEO, 2025). Addressing these challenges requires engineers committed to social welfare who are able to understand and critically engage with the social and political ramifications of engineering practice in a field that has traditionally defined problems in purely technological terms. A recognition of this need is reflected in the US’s Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) criteria that engineering students graduate with “an ability to apply engineering design to produce solutions that meet specified needs with consideration of public health, safety, and welfare, as well as global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic factors” and “an ability to recognize ethical and professional responsibilities in engineering situations” (ABET, n.d.). Likewise, the European Accredited Engineer (EUR-ACE^®) system of the European Network for Accreditation of Engineering Education (ENAEE) identifies the ability to handle complexity in the field and reflect on “relevant social and ethical issues” as a requirement for bachelor degree training and the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) includes understanding the impact of “professional engineering solutions in societal and environmental contexts” as a program outcome (ENAEE, 2022; AICTE, 2018). As this Special Issue on Rethinking Engineering Education asserts, engineering education is thus at a critical juncture. Transforming engineering education to prepare students with more profound understandings of ethical, social, and sustainability implications of technological solutions calls for the development and analysis of course experiences that integrate self-reflexivity, civic engagement, and social justice as central practices.

There has been a movement within engineering education towards interdisciplinary curricula and self-directed, project-based experiential learning as a means to cultivate systems thinking and develop interpersonal and other professional skills deemed essential for the modern engineer (Felder & Brent, 2003; Van den Beemt et al., 2020). Service learning, for example, is an experiential pedagogy that combines an organized educational experience that fulfills learning objectives through hands-on activities that meet community-expressed needs, often with an emphasis on reflection and reciprocity (Narong & Hallinger, 2024; Tharakan et al., 2024). Service learning has been embraced as a form of experiential learning that develops these professional skills while simultaneously introducing students to the social, economic, and environmental complexities of engineering problem-solving in a real-world context and cultivating a culture of public service (Chihota et al., 2021; Dewoolkar et al., 2009; Hirsch et al., 2023; Litchfield et al., 2016; Mclean et al., 2019; Sevier et al., 2012; Tharakan et al., 2024). The increasing prominence of service learning within engineering is evidenced by the growth of Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) initiatives in the US (Coyle et al., 2006), the 2006 launch of the International Journal for Service Learning in Engineering, and the global Engineers Without Borders movement.

Cultivating socially responsible engineers through community engaged pedagogy also has the potential to address persistent racial and gender disparities within engineering education itself. In the US, both a curricular emphasis on social responsibility and service learning appear to appeal in particular to students that are under-represented in engineering, namely Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students, especially those who are also women (ASEE, 2023). Women enter college placing greater value on social responsibility and are often motivated to pursue engineering as a means of contributing to the greater social good (N. E. Canney & Bielefeldt, 2015; Nilsson, 2015). At least one study suggests Native American students similarly enter science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields with an orientation towards communal rather than individualistic goals and a strong desire to help their tribal communities (J. L. Smith et al., 2014). Reimagining engineering education requires a cultural shift in engineering towards greater social responsibility and engagement, and the above studies demonstrate that this shift may also marshal additional benefits in terms of increasing the representation of students of color and women in the engineering field.

Despite these calls for change, there is evidence that engineering programs have not been successful in graduating more engaged and socially conscious engineers. Using longitudinal survey data from four colleges, Cech shows that engineering students’ interest in public welfare concerns declined over the course of their undergraduate education due to socialization into a professional “culture of disengagement” (Cech, 2013). N. Canney and Bielefeld (2015) similarly found evidence of an erosion of social responsibility attitudes among seniors as compared to freshman at five institutions, suggesting a change in attitudes and/or the attrition of students with a strong ethic of social responsibility out of engineering majors (N. E. Canney & Bielefeldt, 2015). Rulifson and Bielefeldt (2019) likewise demonstrated, through four years of longitudinal interviewing with engineering students, that their concern for improving the lives of marginalized individuals was reduced by technical courses and internships (Rulifson & Bielefeldt, 2019). The share of women graduating with undergraduate degrees in engineering declined between 2000 and 2013 despite their growing share of the undergraduate student population (National Science Board, 2016), and although the share of engineering degrees earned by women increased from 2011 to 2020, women remain heavily underrepresented (National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, 2023). Large gaps in the representation of Black, Hispanic, and American Indian/Alaskan Native students and professionals in science and engineering at all levels of education also persist (American Society for Engineering Education, 2020; Garrison, 2013; ASEE, 2023). Ong, Jumot-Pascal, and Ko have systematically reviewed women of colors’ experience of exclusion and barriers to advancement, citing National Science Foundation statistics that only 7.6% of annual undergraduate engineering degrees are awarded to women of color when they comprise 20.6% of the national population, as compared to 12.7% awarded to white women and 79.1% awarded to men of any race/ethnicity annually (National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, 2023; Ong et al., 2020).

Amidst these ongoing trends, a growing body of scholarship offers insight into how particular forms of service learning experiences are effective in both shifting student mindsets toward social responsibility and social justice issues (Bielefeldt & Lima, 2019; N. Canney & Bielefeldt, 2015; Celio et al., 2011; Eyler & Giles, 1999; Gordon da Cruz, 2013, 2017; Mclean et al., 2019; Reynante et al., 2017; Reynante, 2021; Sevier et al., 2012), as well as attracting, retaining, and supporting underrepresented students in engineering (Bosman et al., 2017; Duffy et al., 2011; Dzombak et al., 2016; Matusovich et al., 2013). Adding to this literature, we offer an important focus on how engineering students, and women and underrepresented students in particular, are experiencing social justice-oriented community-engaged engineering curriculum. In this paper we report on an advanced interdisciplinary undergraduate course at a public research university that explicitly integrated social justice content with hands-on community engaged projects. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of student experience in this class we show how a service learning format that thoroughly integrates social justice content and community expertise can serve as a valuable pedagogical strategy for developing critical social consciousness among engineering majors. The course, an elective cross-listed between engineering and social sciences, is one of many (over 100 offered per year) that fulfills a graduation requirement that requires students to take a course that explores race, culture, and ethnicity in America. The course was developed as part of a program to help foster community engaged pedagogy on campus, and the development and teaching of the course is built around long-term relationships with a variety of community partners. The partners play an ongoing role in shaping and reshaping the course, and the goals of students’ community engagement stretches beyond traditional service learning to embrace mutually developed goals that are achieved beyond any single semester of student engagement.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Course Description: E157AC: Engineering, the Environment, and Society

This case study analyzes student experience of an advanced undergraduate engineering course at a public research university that integrated social justice content with hands-on community engaged projects in Spring 2014 and Spring 2015. The course enrolled 41 and 61 students each year (respectively), primarily (72%) in their first two years of a 4 year degree program. The majority (86%) of students enrolled were engineering undergraduates from a wide variety of disciplines, while the remaining (14%) were from a wide variety of non-engineering majors. E157AC: Engineering, the Environment, and Society is part of the American Cultures Engaged Scholarship (ACES) Program, in partnership with the American Cultures Center and Public Service Center, at the University of California, Berkeley. ACES is designed to enhance student learning by combining teaching and practice, and support faculty in incorporating community-engaged pedagogy into their classrooms by assisting with community partnership development, course design, and managing logistics for community engaged projects (UC Berkeley Public Service Center, 2025). In addition to support from the ACES program, the Engineering Dean’s Office provided additional support for the course and community partnerships, seeing the course as a way to support underrepresented students in engineering by offering course content related to their own lived experiences prior to entering the university. Together, the support from ACES and the Dean’s Office ensured stipends for community partners, extra teaching assistants, and funds to facilitate the community projects. Prior to this study, the course had run for 1 year but was built on over 10 years of relationships between instructors and local community partners–and continues to be taught by author Khalid Kadir and graduate student instructors at the time of this writing.

E157AC course content focused on the environment and environmental justice issues in the US and drew on the work of Harding, Kabo & Baillie, and Riley to explore the connections between environmental engineering and systems of racial and class-based oppression, exclusionary notions of expertise that privilege technical forms of knowledge, and the political economic structures that set the context for the work of engineers (Harding, 2008; Kabo & Baillie, 2009; Riley, 2008). Fundamentally, the course challenged students to understand the social and political nature of technical work by inviting them to evaluate the relationship between engineering projects and the communities affected by those projects. However, rather than simply focusing on the outcomes of engineering interventions, the course sought to question the epistemological assumptions commonly embedded within engineering practices as well as the social and political positioning of engineers within society. In doing so, students were encouraged to expand the questions, problem definitions, and data deemed relevant to the practice of engineering in addition to interrogating their own ethical positions as they prepare for careers as engineers.

Institutionally, the motivation for creating the course was part of a larger effort to support students from underrepresented minorities and first-generation college students in engineering. In addition to creating tutoring, mentoring, and scholarship programs, this course was created as a way to connect the work of engineers to marginalized communities, and to make the work of engineers relevant to the lived experiences of students coming from such communities.

Roughly half of enrolled students self-selected to work in teams of three to five students on an environmental problem in partnership with one of five local community-based non-profit organizations. On the first day of the semester, students were invited to choose one major final assessment, an individual research paper or a group project. Upon being provided brief abstracts of each partner and project, students were given one week to apply to participate in a project. Students were informed that project participation would require time and effort beyond the scope of the course, and to account for that they would receive one extra unit of course credit. After reviewing student applications, which included a skills self-assessment and a number of short answer questions assessing motivation and aptitude, the teaching team decided to give every student who applied a place on a project team. Beyond the major final assessment (39% of students’ course grade), student assessment was based upon course participation (15%), two analytical reflection exercises (8%), five reading responses (20%), and three problem sets (18%). Of particular relevance to this study, the reflection exercises were designed to encourage students to critically analyze both their personal and professional identities and positionalities, and to situate these within the world around them. These exercises enabled students to practice, and receive feedback on, integrating content from readings and class discussions with attention to observed injustices in the world, especially in relation to their personal and professional connections to such injustices.

Each partner organization worked with disadvantaged communities directly impacted by environmental problems, and all partners had mission statements that prioritized social justice and/or explicit political framing of their work. Partnerships were developed with expectations of long-term relationships between the university and the partners. To formalize the partnerships, memoranda of understanding (MOUs) between each partner and the university were co-created, and a coordinator from the teaching team was assigned as a regular point of contact. Drawing on principles of community-based participatory research (Wallerstein & Duran, 2010), the projects were explicitly designed to address community-identified concerns and research needs in a process of collaborative problem definition and resolution that redefined the role of the engineering students as one of participants in problem solving rather than solution providers, thereby attempting to disrupt “the hierarchies that attend technical expertise” (Ottinger, 2011) and model the valuing of other forms of knowledge. This process of MOU and project co-creation was designed to circumvent more traditional client-expert models of engagement and emphasize student accountability.

Projects focused on a wide range of environmental issues including poor drinking water quality, air pollution, and stormwater management. As an example, one project was completed in partnership with Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) in Oakland California, an organization that has been working on issues of air pollution facing poor communities of color since 1978. CBE’s model for change, as described on their website as of 18 July 2023, relies on a combination of scientific research, community organizing, and legal advocacy to work towards environmental justice in the communities they serve (Communities for a Better Environment, n.d.). In this project, students worked directly with the organization as well as local community members to collect samples of particulate matter air pollution that residents had identified as a concern near an elementary school in their neighborhood. Their final deliverable was a detailed report which included information on the pollutants of concern, the results of their sampling study, as well as a brief overview of the history and context of the problem they were engaging with based upon interviews and meetings with local community members. A second project was completed in partnership with California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) in Salinas Valley California. CRLA, whose work focuses on providing no-cost legal and advocacy services to low-income rural communities (described on their webpage as of 18 July 2023), had recently started a project to assist rural residents in Salinas Valley whose drinking water was contaminated with arsenic and nitrate (CRLA, n.d.). As a part of this project, students worked with local community members to understand their needs and then develop a drinking water toolkit to help residents identify and purchase a drinking water treatment system appropriate for their household.

This particular project is situated at the intersection of the authors’ interests in how scientific training in higher education–with a focus on engineering in particular–is a space of possibility for social justice praxis that strengthens self-determination for both underrepresented students as well as local community groups. The three of us come from multiple disciplines whose teaching and scholarship focuses on social and environmental justice, political economy, public health, the politics of knowledge production, STEM education, and the history of science and technology. Our experience in the academy is complemented by ongoing work with organizations working towards social change beyond campus boundaries, and two of the authors have long-standing relationships with the community partners who took part in the course. During the research and writing of this article, we all held relative positions of privilege as academics, albeit disparate: one author was an adjunct faculty member, and two others graduate students. The authors compromise a mix of racial and gender identities: two are white, one is mixed race, and two are women, one is a man. None of the authors live in the communities affected by the environmental injustices covered in the course.

2.2. Methods Overview

In this work we assess the effectiveness of social justice course content and community engaged learning experiences in shifting student attitudes towards civic engagement and social responsibility. We used mixed-methods to evaluate student experiences in the form of two specific strategies; (1) quantitative analysis of matched pre/post survey data collected from the second cohort of students (N = 39), and (2) qualitative data from focus group discussions with the subset of students from the first cohort who participated in the community engaged projects (N = 3 focus groups, 10 students total). Due to funding limitations, the evaluation took place over the course of one semester. As a result, focus groups with project participants from the first cohort of students took place at the same time as the survey of the second cohort of students (roughly 9 months after the first cohort had completed the course). It was therefore not possible to have the two sets of data inform one another in the traditional manner of a mixed methods design. Instead, the focus groups were intended to provide for a richer understanding of the role of community engagement than could be measured with a survey.

The survey instrument sought to measure shifts in student attitudes about social justice and social responsibility. The focus group discussion centered on the role of the community-engaged project in student learning. Through both methods, we also sought to evaluate whether the course changed motivation and interest in a career in engineering as a means of contributing to the public good. We were particularly interested in whether the approach fostered motivation and interest among students from under-represented backgrounds.

2.3. Surveys

Online pre- and post-semester surveys were administered during the second and final week of instruction, respectively, to all students in the second cohort of students to take the course. In order to avoid the potential for coercion, students were contacted up to three times by a person not on the teaching team and advised that their participation was voluntary and that the course instructor would have no knowledge of their participation or responses until after grades had been submitted. The survey instruments employed Likert-scale questions intended to measure student attitudes regarding four constructs (

Table 1. Survey instrument questions and the four constructs they were used to measure.

Construct 1	Questions 2
Justice-oriented civic engagement (adapted from Gordon da Cruz, 2013 as derived from Westheimer & Kahne, 2004) (α = 0.86)	1. How important is it to challenge inequalities in society?
	2. How important is it to think critically about laws and government?
	3. How important is it to protest when something in society needs changing?
	4. How much of a priority is it to focus on root causes when thinking about problems in society?
	5. How important is it to work for positive social change?
Socially responsible engineering (partially adapted from Lathem et al., 2011 as well as Painter, 2012) (α = 0.90)	6. To what extent is interdisciplinary knowledge an improvement over knowledge obtained from a single discipline?
	7. How important is it for engineers to be sensitive to different viewpoints among stakeholders that will be affected by an engineering project?
	8. How relevant are the perspectives of historically marginalized groups to the practice of engineering?
	9. How important is it that engineers consider how they are personally connected to broader systems of inequality?
	10. How concerned are you that engineering education becomes more diverse in terms of race, gender, class, culture, etc.?
	11. How important is it that engineers be trained to consider the social and political impacts of the projects they work on?
Interest in engineering (α = 0.60)	12. How interested are you in a career in engineering?
	13. How confident are you that you would make a good engineer?
	14. How prepared do you feel to thoughtfully and effectively engage with ethical challenges you might encounter in your career?
Community-engaged scholarship (post-semester survey only) (α = 0.80) (partially adapted from Gordon da Cruz, 2013)	15. How worthwhile was the community-engaged project?
	16. How much did the community-engaged project contribute to your knowledge of how to solve problems that impact the public good?
	17. How much did the community-engaged project influence your understanding of social and environmental inequalities?
	18. To what extent did the community-engaged project contribute to your understanding of how differences in power between participants in a project may influence its outcome?
	19. As a result of your experience with the community-engaged project, are you less or more confident in your ability to work with people who are different from you (in race, culture, age, economic background, etc.)? 3

¹ Cronbach’s alpha is given for the pre-semester survey for the first three constructs (N = 50). Values for the post-semester survey responses were 0.74, 0.82, and 0.68, respectively (N = 42). The community-engaged scholarship questions were asked only of project participants (N = 11 of 42 students who completed the post-semester survey). ² Response options to all but one question were on a 5-point unidirectional Likert scale that was scored from 1 (least importance) to 5 (greatest importance). Examples include “Not important/Slightly important/Moderately important/Very important/Essential” or “No influence/Slight influence/Moderate influence/Strong influence/Very strong influence”. In the post-semester survey, students were additionally asked “To what extent has this course influenced your thinking on the questions above?” after responding to each of the questions related to the first three constructs. ³ Responses offered were on a 7-point, bidirectional Likert scale to allow for negative responses and scored from −3 (most negative) to 3 (most positive), with 0 indicating neutrality: Much less confident/Moderately less confident/Slightly less confident/Neutral or no effect/Slightly more confident/Moderately more confident/Much more confident. Because no survey respondents chose any of the first three categories, those categories were dropped and responses were coded from 0 (neutral) to 3 (much more confident).

): justice-oriented civic engagement, social responsibility in engineering, and interest in engineering. Survey questions were largely adapted from Gordon da Cruz’s (2013) instruments used to assess students’ perception of community-engaged pedagogy in courses associated with the ACES program at UC Berkeley, with which our course is affiliated, and thus enables us to cohesively and longitudinally build on a growing body of data about this program. Notably, the questions are phrased in ways that aim to measure more general perceptions rather than personal ones. This choice reflects attention to shifts in students’ structural thinking and familiarity with socio-historical context, rather than individualized opinion, particularly in relation to justice-oriented civic engagement and community-engaged scholarship (Gordon da Cruz, 2013, pp. 226–227; Nagda et al., 2003). Subsequently, we used focus groups to allow for more individual reflection at the intersection of students’ community engaged experiences, course content, and personal identities (see Section 2.4).

Our concept of justice-oriented civic engagement was adopted from Westheimer and Kahne’s research on civic engagement programs (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004). In contrast to other definitions of civic engagement that emphasize personal responsibility or participation, justice-oriented civic engagement (termed “justice-oriented citizenship” by Westheimer & Kahne, 2004, pp. 242–245) focuses on understanding the relationships among social, economic, and political forces and pays explicit attention to injustice, social movements, and systemic social change. We included five slightly modified questions related to justice-oriented civic engagement, out of six original questions that Gordon da Cruz adapted from Westheimer and Kahne (Gordon da Cruz, 2013; Westheimer & Kahne, 2004). One item relating to consumption patterns (“I think it’s important to buy products from socially responsible businesses” in Westheimer and Kahne (2004) and Gordon da Cruz (2013, pp. 54, 223)) was dropped in an effort to maximize participation by minimizing survey length and because we felt personal consumption was not as relevant to the topics covered in the course. Declarative statements were also rephrased as questions for consistency in format with other survey items, e.g., “I think it’s important to…” (Gordon da Cruz, 2013, p. 223) were rephrased as “How important is it….?”. The five survey items included were validity and reliability tested among high school students by Westheimer and Kahne (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004).

To understand students’ perspectives on the place of social responsibility within engineering education and practice, we designed six questions partially adapted from Lathem and Painter (Lathem et al., 2011; Painter, 2012), to assess the importance students placed on interdisciplinary knowledge, diversity within the profession, and relationships between engineers, marginalized communities, and systems of inequality. Potential changes in student interest in engineering were assessed using three questions about student confidence, interest and preparedness to work as an engineer. We wanted to gauge whether students felt discouraged or less enthusiastic about a career in engineering after studying material that critiqued the role or complicity of engineers in social ills such as war and environmental degradation; or whether, in contrast, students felt more interest and motivation to pursue engineering as a means to work towards social welfare after completing the course.

For students who participated in a community-engaged project (roughly half of the students enrolled in the course), the post-semester survey asked additional questions designed to assess the extent to which the community-engaged component of the course contributed to their learning and confidence in working across difference.

Survey responses on a 5-point unidirectional Likert scale were quantified as 1 (response indicating least importance) to 5 (response indicating greatest importance) and summed to derive an overall score for each of the four constructs. None of the questions were reverse coded. While our sample size was too small to adequately assess the reliability or validity of the survey instrument, we did calculate Cronbach’s α using the full set of survey responses to assess internal consistency for each survey construct. The magnitude of change in attitudes was assessed by subtracting pre-semester from matched post-semester scores. Responses from students of the following groups of special interest defined a priori were analyzed separately: students who participated in the community-engaged projects, women, and students from under-represented racial or ethnic backgrounds. Under-represented students were defined as non-international African American, Latino/Hispanic, or Native American students in accordance with university policy (Office of the Vice Chancellor of Equity & Inclusion, 2011). Non-parametric hypothesis tests were used throughout because responses were not normally distributed.

2.4. Focus Groups

In order to gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the role of the community-engaged projects on student learning and attitudes, students from the first class cohort who had participated in a community-engaged project were invited to participate in a focus group discussion led by the course instructor. Ten out of 24 eligible students (42%) participated in one of three focus groups (3–4 students per group) based on scheduling availability. Focus groups lasted 1.5–2 h and utilized a pre-written discussion guide to serve as the basis for semi-structured discussion. In an effort to maximize candor, no two students who had worked on the same project were placed together in a focus group. Students were informed of the research goals and that we were attempting to explore a variety of viewpoints and perspectives rather than achieve consensus and were encouraged to share both positive and negative opinions. Focus groups were audio recorded for subsequent transcription and analysis with MaxQDA version 11 qualitative data analysis software.

A codebook of deductive codes, developed prior to coding, underwent slight modification during the process of coding as new themes or sub-themes were identified. MaxQDA 11 was used to identify the frequency of codes and visualize relationships between them. Transcripts were also independently reviewed by two researchers to identify illustrative quotes.

The study protocol was exempted from review by the institutional review board at our university because it did not require changes to normal instructional practices and posed less than minimal risk to participants. In order to incentivize participation, students who completed the survey or participated in a focus group were entered into a random drawing for one of three $75 gift certificates to amazon.com.

3. Results

3.1. Survey Results

A total of 50 (82%) enrolled students completed the initial survey and 42 (69%) completed the final, post-semester survey. A total of 40 (66%) students completed both surveys. One student completed both surveys but answered “Not important” to all pre-semester survey questions pertaining to justice-oriented citizenship and socially responsible engineering (11 out of 14 questions). This was assumed to have been an error because only five other students responded “Not important” to any of these questions, and each of them did so to only one question. To be conservative and avoid overestimating the effect of the course in changing student attitudes, this student was excluded from our analysis, leaving us with a sample size of N = 39.

Given our lack of full demographic information for students who completed neither survey, it is difficult to evaluate the representativeness of this sample. Compared to other groups, White and East Asian students appear to have been over-represented relative to their proportion among enrolled students (

Table 2. Characteristics of the study population (N = 61) and survey respondents (N = 39) of undergraduate students. Categories have been collapsed to protect student confidentiality. Only students who completed both the pre- and post- semester survey are included in the analysis. Percentages refer to the percentage of enrolled students who completed both surveys.

	Enrolled (N = 61)	Survey Respondents (N = 39)
GENDER
Male	39	26	(67%)
Female or other	22	13	(59%)
RACE/ETHNICITY
Chicano/Latino, African American/Black, other or mixed 4	15	10	(67%)
White	13	12	(92%)
East Asian 5	12	11	(92%)
South or Southeast Asian 6	12	6	(50%)
Missing	9	0	(--) 7
MAJOR
Electrical engineering & computer science	20	12	(60%)
Mechanical engineering	9	7	(78%)
Civil & environmental engineering or bioengineering	11	7	(58%)
Other engineering major	10	6	(60%)
Other or undecided	11	7	(64%)

⁴ Includes students who identified with more than one category, unless that category included white. In the latter case, they were categorized with the minority group with which they also identified, following convention. ⁵ Includes students who identified as being of Chinese, Japanese, and/or Korean descent. ⁶ Includes students who identified as being of East Indian, Pakistani, or Filipino descent. ⁷ This symbol refers to a null value.

), while men and women were equally represented. Only 7 of 39 students who completed both surveys were from under-represented backgrounds.

Cronbach’s α values suggest internal consistency (scale reliability) for all but one of our domains (Table 1). Cronbach’s α for interest in engineering was below the commonly accepted value of 0.7. This suggests that responses to these three questions may not have been closely related; however, pairwise correlations between questions in this domain were similar to those between questions in the others. Cronbach’s α also increases with the number of items in a scale, and the low value may be attributable to the fact that there were only three questions.

Few students assigned little or no importance (Likert scale items 1 and 2) to questions about justice-oriented civic engagement and socially responsible engineering in the pre-semester survey. Median scores for both measures were higher for women than men in the initial survey. The median score was 23 for women vs. 21 for men out of 25 possible for justice-oriented civic engagement and 27 for women vs. 24 for men out of 30 for socially responsible engineering (total N = 39). However, these differences were not statistically significant at p < 0.05 (Wilcoxon signed rank test). At the beginning of the course, women expressed less interest in engineering than men (median score 9 vs. 12 out of 15, p = 0.03, Wilcoxon signed rank test). Among survey respondents, women were more likely to choose to participate in a community-engaged project than men (46% of women participated vs. 19% of men), although the difference was not statistically significant (p = 0.13, Fisher’s exact test).

Students from under-represented racial and ethnic backgrounds also had higher median scores on the pre-semester measures of justice-oriented civic engagement and socially responsible engineering (median scores of 24 and 25.5 for under-represented students vs. 21 and 24.5 for others out of 25 and 30 possible, respectively). They also expressed greater interest in engineering in the initial survey (median score of 13 for under-represented students vs. 10 for others, out of 15 possible) and were more likely to choose to participate in a community-engaged project than other students (43% vs. 25% rates of participation, respectively). None of these differences were statistically significant. We found no statistically significant differences between the initial attitudes of project participants compared to students who did not participate in projects in the pre-semester survey (median score of 24 for project participants vs. 21 for others out of 25 for justice-oriented civic engagement; median score of 26 vs. 24 out of 30 for social justice in engineering; median score of 10 vs. 11 out of 15 for interest in engineering; all p > 0.10, Wilcoxon signed rank tests).

In the post-semester survey, students indicated a small but statistically significant increase in the importance of justice-oriented civic engagement, social responsibility in engineering, and interest in engineering (mean increase in score from matched pre-semester responses [p-value, one-sided Wilcoxon signed rank-test] of 0.6 [p = 0.08], 2.4 [p < 0.001], and 0.4 (p = 0.04, respectively) (Figure 1). Women and project participants exhibited a greater increase in their interest in engineering (mean increase in score [p-value, one-sided Wilcoxon signed rank test] of 0.9 for women vs. 0.2 for men [p = 0.03], and 1.3 for project participants vs. 0.07 for students who did not participate in projects [p = 0.01]). Other differences in our subgroup analyses were not statistically significant at p < 0.05.

In post-semester responses regarding the community-engaged projects (questions 15–19), students who participated in the projects indicated that the experience contributed positively to their learning with one exception. The most common response to the first four questions was 4 (“strong” contribution or influence), followed by 3 (“moderate”), 5 (“very strong”) and 2 (“slight”) (N = 11 project participant who completed the post-semester survey). However, students were split on whether their experience made them more or less confident in their ability to work with people different from them with respect to race, culture, age, or economic background, with five students reporting no difference and six students reporting much more confidence. This may reflect the fact that in at least one of the five projects, students worked primarily with a staff member and had little personal interaction with the community. It may also suggest that students would have benefitted from additional training in strategies for working across differences.

3.2. Focus Group Results

Seventeen out of the 21 students contacted agreed to participate in a focus group. Based on scheduling availability, 10 students were chosen to take part in one of the three focus groups. Overall, students participating in the focus groups expressed that the community projects were positive learning experiences. Several students indicated that the experience left them wanting more opportunities for community-engaged learning, and that they were actively seeking out such opportunities. One student reported receiving a grant to continue work with the non-profit organization he had worked with during the class. To complement our surveys with more student-driven data, we used inductive coding to identify patterns in focus group transcripts rather than imposing preset codes. One author read through transcripts and coded small segments that were then reviewed by all authors, refined for consistency, and then used to develop broader categories. Three prominent themes emerged across student comments and conversations within the focus groups: epistemological expansion, engineering responsibility, and ethical engineering careers.

We observed the first theme, epistemological expansion, as students reported gaining an appreciation for the value of knowledge beyond narrowly defined technical capabilities through their involvement in community engaged projects. While quantitative knowledge is often viewed as objective and absolute within technical fields, students expressed a recognition that such knowledge was partial and that other forms of knowledge—including first-hand experiential knowledge—could make important contributions in defining problems and solutions. Moreover, students came to appreciate the political stakes involved in the types of knowledge that are privileged within the engineering profession and indicated a need for engineers to go beyond the traditional boundaries of engineering practice and have an open-minded approach that centered around listening to community concerns. For example, when asked what skills were required to be a good engineer, one student stated:

“Keeping an open mind…oftentimes these issues arise because you did the bare minimum.… Obviously, the technical skills are important…but you should focus on communication and the ability to connect with the community you are working with. A lot of engineers are just in cubicles or offices or whatever… being willing and able to go out to a community and figure out what … the human factors are especially, I think is a really important component.”

Another student similarly emphasized the importance of “listening, and then being able to put this [engineering knowledge] into context. The political, the social, taking engineering out of the vacuum—that’s huge.” A third student posited that in order to incorporate other forms of knowledge, engineers needed to unlearn some of their training. When asked what makes a good engineer, they said:

“I think it’s the ability to challenge your pre-defined conceptions and challenge your own biases and try to get rid of those when looking at the world. To unlearn everything you’ve learned, that is a very valid point I’ve realized…. [When working with communities], there’re other factors you have to consider. Unless you take the time to go in there and learn from their perspective and kind of not assume anything, you can’t really do your job as effectively as you should.”

These statements were linked to students’ recognition of the complexity of the problems they set out to work on in their community engaged projects, and the limits of one-size-fits-all technical solutions. Rather than decide that such problems were beyond the scope of engineering practice, several students expressed a desire to gain more broad-based education to better equip them with the skills required to take on such complexity. They also remarked on the importance of experiential learning in attaining these skills. For example, one student expressed “You can’t learn everything you need in a classroom…It’s like the difference between book smart and street smart…It doesn’t all come in an academic setting. You have to go out there and live it a little bit to really know how to handle the situation.”

Reckoning with complexity, and the value of different types of knowledge, was connected to students’ exploration of imperatives to think and act in particular ways as engineers. We found this second prominent theme, engineering responsibility, in students’ reports of coming out of the course with a new appreciation of their moral and ethical responsibilities as engineers and an increased desire to center such considerations in their future careers. One student stated, “We have a responsibility to think about what kind of engineers we want to be in the world.” Another argued that engineers needed to start “thinking holistically” and that “the ability to actually take a step back and say ‘ok this is what we are working on, but this is what we should be working on’, is huge.” At least one student remarked that this “has been a pretty big shift for me”. One conversation between three students illustrated that the course instilled greater awareness of and confidence in their own beliefs:

Student 1: “I think that with an awareness of everything we learned in [the course] comes more of a confidence to stick to your morals, and an awareness of more of what you want to be as an engineer… I came out of the course knowing more of what I wanted to do than when I entered the course… an engineer that seeks public feedback and thinks of wide scale impacts that my project is going to have, and takes into account the environmental, social, and political influences on my projects.”

Student 2: “I think it also plays into not only what kind of engineer you want to be, but what kind of person you want to be, also. How you want your morals to play into your decisions.”

Student 3: “I definitely agree … helping to definitely make your ethical foundation more firm [sic]. Helping me have confidence in my beliefs. It helped me develop my beliefs to a large extent, too.”

For many students, this shift in perspective and motivation appears to have been closely tied to their direct engagement with communities who were struggling against various forms of injustice. Several students indicated that working directly with communities was both transformational and motivational in a way that classroom or laboratory experiences could not replicate, humanized problems that may otherwise have appeared purely technological, and inspired a sense of social responsibility and commitment:

“I think I would say the biggest things this project and this course impacted was my mentality and perspective…the hands-on application of what you’re learning and who you’re working for is not something you get from a classroom. My mentality for the future has changed.”

“Going out and working directly with the community, you really do come across the human aspect. It just motivates you even more that there are faces behind what you are doing. Everybody deserving the equal right to life and resources, and it just makes you fight harder. The project definitely showed me a side of implementation of solutions that you don’t necessarily get if you are just learning about it in a class or just working in a lab doing research which is a bit more disconnected…You get to talk to people about their lives and you want to help.”

“Numbers are numbers… When you are actually working with people who are suffering it makes it more close [sic] to the heart and motivates you to find those trends to show that [air quality] violations are occurring…and hopefully enact some positive change.”

“The class was wonderful but without the project I don’t know that it would have been that valuable to me. It’s very easy to talk about things in a classroom setting and it makes it easy to believe it when you visualize it on maps and stuff, but where you are actually physically there talking to people experiencing that [injustice] or when you are playing a role in that it makes social justice very real and a very real problem we have to address.”

Having completed these projects, students expressed a desire to rethink their career priorities, and to consider their moral and ethical positioning within their careers. This marks a third and final theme: ethical engineering careers. This theme emerged from the way students moved the previous two themes forward to envision how they might commit to being a different kind of engineer in the future, and what forms of compromise and accountability would be required. In remarking on how their course experience shaped their sense of engineering as a field of practice, or career, one student explained that “Definitely career wise it [the class and project participation] weighed in on…whether I was contributing to equality vs. inequality. Taking the course made that a larger focus in my life.” Another stated that “From a career standpoint, I think the class just made me think about …what ideas I want to be reinforcing as an energy engineer, and what kind of future I want to be buying into.” A third student articulated that foregrounding ethical and moral considerations may require sacrifices in other regards:

“I absolutely do not want to just be an engineer. I want to be an engineer doing things to help improve the world… In some sense, I find the math and all these … technical problems really fascinating. And in some sense the pay is very good, but I don’t want to do just that… I decided I was willing to compromise some part, perhaps a good substantial amount, of the actual technical aspect or the financial aspect if it was actually meaningful to me… I want something meaningful out of a job, not just a job.”

In the above quote, as in others, students integrate the material stakes of engineering ethics for broader communities with the material realities of what it will mean, in their visions, to practice engineering ethically. Some of these material realities took the form of behaviors and practices that were formatively shaped by the structure of their learning. Students expressed the importance of completing community engaged projects in the context of a class. Many students reported taking part in year-round volunteer activities or summer internships. By integrating projects into a semester-long course, though, students found that they were more accountable than they were in their less structured volunteer activities:

“The class setting helps you to be more accountable … and that was not the case for me during the summer [on a separate project]. In a class setting there’s…someone watching. There is a fact that you have a grade on the line, the fact that your classmates are doing the same thing and you are physically meeting up … and I guess in the class you did a lot of work for us … in terms of setting up the community project and all the ways it would work.”

In multiple instances, students emphasized that it was the course format, in contrast to volunteer and internship experiences that supported structure and consistency in their community engagement practices. This student testimony suggests that course specific features like sustained faculty support, peer perceptions and relationships, and grading consequences, facilitated their accountability practices. Accountability is necessary to contribute to social justice work as an engineer. This insight gives us an opportunity to envision a future of engineering education that allocates more resources toward curriculum that thoroughly integrates community engagement with long-standing community partners, rather than brief or extracurricular community activities.

4. Discussion

Our results demonstrate that a combination of social justice course content and community engaged pedagogy can strengthen engineering student attitudes towards justice-oriented civic engagement and social responsibility. Reimagining engineering education and moving students’ understanding of their profession beyond technicality and towards a more people-oriented approach, would thus be well-served by explicitly incorporating justice-based content into courses and by moving courses beyond campus and through deep engagements with marginalized communities. Pre- and post- semester survey results showed a significant positive shift in response to questions about the social responsibilities of engineers in particular. While we did not detect statistically significant differences in survey responses related to civic engagement and social responsibility between the students who participated in a community-engaged project and those who did not, survey responses and focus group discussion both indicated that participants valued the project experience. In survey responses, project participants exhibited a greater increase in their interest and motivation to pursue a career in engineering than students who took the course but did not elect to participate in a project. The focus group discussions suggested that community engagement played an important role in shifting student’s sense of moral and ethical responsibilities, humanizing problems that might have traditionally been construed as technological, and deepening the value students placed on non-technical forms of knowledge and expertise as well as their desire and commitment to work for the public good. These results point to the potential for community engagement, integrated into engineering coursework, as a powerful pathway to reimagine engineering education.

Our approach differed from other service learning initiatives in that the community partners were specifically chosen because of their stated social justice mission and their direct engagement and work to develop the leadership and capacity of marginalized communities. Project design was intentionally collaborative from project inception (problem definition) to conclusion (design of work products and evaluation). We believe that this approach was important to the shifts in social responsibility that we saw among students because (1) the partner organizations themselves centered moral and ethical concerns in their work, and (2) in contrast to traditional client/expert relationships, our approach modeled a partnership in which power and agency were shared among participants. This model of partnership valued multiple forms of expertise, including those derived from often dismissed or excluded sources of knowledge, such as lived experience. Focus group participants also emphasized the importance of the fact that projects were embedded into a class structure in ensuring accountability and creating a meaningful learning experience.

The fact that women were more likely to choose to participate in the community-engaged component of the course is in accordance with prior research and anecdotal evidence that women place greater value on social responsibility and are more motivated to pursue engineering as a means of contributing to the social good than men (N. Canney & Bielefeldt, 2015; Nilsson, 2015). Our survey results suggest that the course increased interest in engineering among women more than men. This suggests that critical, community-engaged pedagogy may be a useful means of attracting and retaining women in engineering disciplines. Although we did not detect a greater increase in engineering interest among students from under-represented racial and ethnic backgrounds than among other students, under-represented students were more likely to choose to participate in a community-engaged project, suggesting our approach may also support efforts to diversify the field. The small number of students from under-represented backgrounds among our survey respondents (n = 7) limited our ability to detect an effect of the course on this subset of students.

Our survey instrument generally exhibited internal consistency (reliability) within survey constructs in this population of college freshman and sophomores, with the exception of our measure of interest in engineering. We caution that our sample size was smaller and the additional assessment of the reliability and validity of our instrument are warranted. One limitation of our survey instrument is the relatively high scores of initial responses, making changes more difficult to detect.

One limitation of our study stems from the fact that, in order to increase the likelihood that projects would deliver useful products to our community partners, we did not randomly assign students to participate in a community-engaged project. Project participants were instead self-selected and as a result may have differed from students who chose not to participate. Our results with respect to the impact of community engagement are therefore not necessarily generalizable to the entire study population. Additionally, the global phrasing of our survey questions—which we adopted from existing instruments (some previously validated) for comparability with prior work—could mean that our results reflect shifts in more general rather than personal student perceptions. Our study was also limited by the fact that focus groups involved the first cohort of students and the survey could only be administered to the second cohort. As a result, focus groups with the first cohort of students took place at the same time as the survey of the second cohort of students (roughly 9 months after they had completed the course).

We also could not follow students over a longer time frame to assess whether the impacts we observed were fleeting or long-lasting, and what, if any, influence the course had on students’ subsequent educational or professional trajectories. Given that this course was for freshman and sophomores, it may be important to integrate social justice and community engagement in upper division coursework as well in order to see sustained effects and effectively combat the erosion in attitudes towards social responsibility and public welfare that have been observed among students as they progress through their undergraduate engineering programs (N. E. Canney & Bielefeldt, 2015; Cech, 2013). One course is likely not nearly enough to satisfy the interests of students in these types of opportunities or to significantly transform the culture of the engineering programs on college campuses.

Finally, we were initially concerned that the course’s critical unpacking of the history of engineering practice and the role of often well-meaning engineers in creating or perpetuating many environmental injustices would cause disillusionment among students. However, our survey results instead showed that interest and motivation to pursue a career in engineering on average increased slightly (Figure 2). Focus group discussions also revealed that project participants articulated a greater motivation and desire to pursue engineering specifically as a means of contributing to the public good and creating a more just world.

5. Conclusions

Using both quantitative and qualitative evidence from an evaluation of an undergraduate course, we conclude that social justice curriculum and community engaged pedagogy can strengthen engineering student attitudes towards justice-oriented civic engagement and social responsibility. In particular, focus groups discussions suggested experiential learning through semester-long collaborative projects with environmental justice organizations that employed the principles of community-based participatory research played a role in shifting student thinking about the moral and ethical responsibilities of engineers, while survey and focus group results indicated they also led to an increase in student interest in and commitment to pursuing engineering careers as a means of contributing to the public good. These findings align with research that has shown how social justice oriented service-learning courses with community-engaged projects can enable engineering students to connect social issues with their own lived experiences in ways that prepare them to take action (Adams, 2007; Storms, 2012); As opposed to more traditional forms of service learning, it is the structure of community relations and curricular focus on power, privilege, and historical and structural inequity in social justice oriented service-learning courses with community engagement (Reynante et al., 2017; Reynante, 2021) that cultivates frequent opportunities for empathy with community members that can assist students in shifting mindsets away from and othering “design-for-charity” approach (Lucena et al., 2010) and toward a “design-for-justice” mindset (Costanza-Chock, 2020; Leydens & Lucena, 2017). Our study also corroborates other evidence suggesting that community-engaged learning may appeal in particular to women and students from under-represented racial and ethnic backgrounds and thereby support efforts to diversify the engineering field. For example, our findings align with data from three large service-learning programs related to success in recruiting and retaining female students; the Service Learning Integrated Throughout a College of Engineering (SLICE) program at University of Massachusetts Lowell (Duffy et al., 2011), EPICS at Purdue University (Matusovich et al., 2013), and the Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship program at Pennsylvania State (Dzombak et al., 2016). Our paper may therefore add to a conversation about how particular forms of service learning are effective in recruiting and retaining diverse students in STEM fields (Bosman et al., 2017; Duffy et al., 2011; Eyler & Giles, 1999).

As service learning and pedagogical approaches that involve greater community engagement continue to grow in engineering higher education, our study contributes to the already robust and expanding calls for how to design a community engaged course that breaks with traditional deficit models of serving disadvantaged clients, and instead foster community-engaged projects that are structured by explicit social justice commitments and curriculum. In a field that often reifies many students’ preexisting exclusionary notions of what counts as expertise and who can be an engineer (Rohde et al., 2020; J. M. Smith & Lucena, 2016), our study contributes to investigations of how social justice community-engaged courses may provide avenues for students to challenge these entrenched oppressions and prepare to effect change—as collaborators with diverse partners—in their professional practice (Hirsch et al., 2023). Our findings also show how such courses might support historically marginalized students in particular through opportunities to (re)center themselves and their communities as socio-technical knowledge-holders and change-making agents, and on how course design not only shapes the recruitment and retention of underrepresented students, but also enables them to (re)imagine their personal experiences and social positions as vital to the political possibilities of their field. Ultimately, the through-line that stands out most from our experiences is that community engaged pedagogy offers a powerful tool to rethink engineering education in two interrelated ways: to serve engineering students who come from underrepresented backgrounds while building a more justice-centered approach to the practice of engineering. Students who are fortunate to experience such powerful forms of pedagogy within their engineering curriculum have a stronger foundation from which they are able to approach their careers in ways that center people, communities, and justice.