Integrating Community Engagement and Service Learning into Environmental Engineering Curricula

Abstract

Engineering education is evolving to train students to work more closely with communities to support holistic sustainability. This has increasingly involved collaborative and participatory research models that address environmental justice challenges within local communities. This research evaluates student learning experiences and changes in perceptions about race, justice, and community in a pair of undergraduate service learning courses in environmental engineering and environmental anthropology that were developed to center environmental justice through service learning. Pre- and post-class attitudinal surveys were administered to 55 students across two courses in environmental engineering and environmental anthropology and then analyzed using content analysis to identify shifts in students’ knowledge and perceptions about community engagement and environmental justice. Before their participation in the classes, many students in the environmental engineering course understood environmental injustice as harm done to the environment. At the conclusion of the semester, their understandings were broadened to include social and infrastructural injustices in communities. For the anthropology course, students had a general working knowledge of environmental justice before participating in the course, but their understanding was expanded to include a more interconnected perspective that included infrastructural systems. In both classes, student learning outcomes enhanced the value of partnering with communities and learning from community members’ lived experiences. By approaching engineering from the perspective of environmental justice, students developed broader and more holistic perspectives about the roles and values of community-based research. Students also gained greater understanding of the complex interplay between race and environment, especially when it comes to infrastructural challenges.

1. Introduction

Over the past few decades, engineering education has shifted to embrace social advances such as sustainability, interdisciplinary teaching, and service learning (Broo et al., 2022; Van den Beemt et al., 2020; Klaassen, 2018). These concepts are becoming fundamental in how society addresses complex challenges not only in academia but also in institutions across the globe (United Nations, 2015). The National Academies of Engineering set forth 14 grand challenges of engineering geared towards directing the future trajectory of engineering (NAE, 2017). These challenges represent the path forward for engineered solutions to complex societal concerns. Of those challenges, one is to restore and improve urban infrastructure. Infrastructure has intentionally and unintentionally upheld social barriers and removed access to resources for vulnerable communities through redlining and a myriad of environmental injustices (Aaronson et al., 2021). Strides have been made to improve failing infrastructure with the nation’s overall infrastructure ranking upgrading from a “C−” to a “C” as a result of large federal investments (ASCE, 2025). Although progress has been made, this low ranking underscores the critical need to address infrastructural inequities across the nation and in particular vulnerable communities.

At the university level, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) sets forth guidelines for engineering program criteria for student learning outcomes, including (1) solving complex engineering problems; (2) designing engineered solutions that are beneficial for local, national, and global society; and (3) acquiring new knowledge alongside other technical competencies (ABET, 2024). These guidelines constitute an important framework for orienting the ways in which engineering is taught at all ABET accredited universities. For example, some instructors have found that community-engaged projects through university service learning programs provide critical opportunities for students to address complex environmental challenges for the benefit of local communities while acquiring skills in stakeholder engagement and the integration of culture and behavior into technological interventions (Alexander et al., 2021; Zuniga-Teran et al., 2025).

Sustainability has emerged as a foundational concept for societally relevant research and has become the baseline in engineering curricula and STEM education overall. Concepts of sustainability have accelerated holistic thinking and in all fields of engineering and engineering education (Leydens & Lucena, 2017). As sustainability has continued to influence engineering science and practice, it has expanded to include attention to social and environmental justice (Tharakan, 2020). Environmental justice concerns the ways in which groups seek to ensure that everyone, regardless of race or class, has a right to the same environmental protection and meaningful involvement in shaping environmental policies in their communities (Bullard, 2021). Environmental justice in engineering education recognizes how people of color, indigenous and tribal communities, and other marginalized groups are disproportionately exposed to environmental pollutants and contaminants and suffer the consequences of these conditions for their health and wellbeing (Wells, 2025). Principles of environmental and social justice are not limited to engineering but extend into an array of STEM and non-STEM fields: chemistry (Lasker & Brush, 2019); geosciences (Darby & Atchison, 2014); health sciences (Peterson et al., 2021; Venkatapuram, 2013); social work (Beltrán et al., 2016); and more recently artificial intelligence (Buccella, 2023; Sahebi & Formosa, 2024). These recent teaching efforts specifically orient science and engineering training opportunities in the environmental justice sector, which seek to examine and address the disproportionate environmental and public health burdens shouldered by underserved communities of color.

Environmental engineering historically focused on meeting human and environmental needs while protecting public health and natural resources. However, training in the field has evolved over time to address a broader set of goals that emphasize sustainability and to work much more collaboratively with impacted communities and other stakeholders (Mihelcic et al., 2017; Wells et al., 2022). The National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM, 2019), for example, articulated five grand challenges that environmental engineering must address for the 21st century, each of which requires community partnerships: (1) sustainably supply food, water, and energy; (2) curb climate change and adapt to its impacts; (3) design a future without pollution and waste; (4) create efficient, healthy, resilient cities; (5) and foster informed decisions and actions (NASEM, 2019). These challenges for environmental engineering align with the United Nations (2015) Sustainable Development Goals, which outline research and resource priorities that require novel interdisciplinary thinking and authentic community engagement.

Efforts have been made to increasingly leverage the power of community-based, participatory approaches to advance environmental sustainability and health equity (Wells, 2025; Montoya et al., 2021; Raphael & Matsuoka, 2023). Recently, however, community engagement in academic training and research, especially with underserved groups, has been critiqued, with some questioning the role of public funding for training and research that emphasizes equity and justice—in both the classroom and the field (Tharakan, 2020). While commitments to train engineering students in the context of community engagement and environmental justice are needed (Natarajarathinam et al., 2021; Montoya et al., 2021; Lucena, 2013; Henderson et al., 2024), the landscape for this has changed in 2025 from as high as the federal level in the US.

Integration of community engaged research and environmental justice into engineering education curricula speaks to the growing need for engineering education to meet the needs of society and genuinely engage communities. The NAE and NASEM grand challenges, ABET criteria, and environmental justice considerations craft an emergence for community engaged research and teaching in engineering education and practice. This contextualization highlights the demand need for transformed research and education. In this article, we describe our efforts to integrate principles and practices of environmental justice into an environmental engineering curriculum in an ABET-accredited university undergraduate degree program. Our work draws from the field of applied environmental anthropology, which uses social science methods and theories to examine coupled social, political, economic, and environmental factors that influence human health and illness. This approach is intentionally outcome-driven and seeks to work collaboratively with communities to co-design interventions to infrastructure and other challenges, such as water insecurity, wastewater service access, stormwater management, air quality monitoring, and brownfields (soil contamination) redevelopment. The research we discuss here focuses on program assessment (Ricke, 2019), specifically the application of pre- and post-course attitudinal surveys for engineering classes that integrated environmental justice through service learning with community partners. Other aspects of our research and curriculum development such as faculty and community member training are reported elsewhere (Henderson et al., 2024). Our integrated approach to repositioning engineering education is accomplished by (1) training academicians to restructure curricula and pedagogy; (2) empowering community organizations to lead in academic spaces; and (3) transforming student training and learning opportunities (Henderson et al., 2024). This integrated approach serves as a multidimensional framework for training future engineers and transforming engineering pedagogy. Training engineers with this approach create technically proficient and socially adept engineers equipped to solve local, national and global issues (Lattuca et al., 2017). These trained engineers are more competent to make informed design decisions who can work interdependently with non-engineers. Our guiding research question is how does participating in community engaged research influence students’ perceptions of environmental justice, community, structural racism and their overall academic experience. The goal of this research was to qualitatively examine shifts in students’ understanding and knowledge of issues pertaining to community collaboration and environmental justice linked to their participation in community-oriented research. This goal was accomplished by using attitudinal assessments which were evaluated through content analysis (Bernard et al., 2017) of the survey results that identified learning gains resulting from student experiences in the community. Overall, this research contributes to the larger body of innovative pedagogical approaches in engineering education research.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. East Tampa

Occupying a little over seven square miles northeast of downtown Tampa, the community of East Tampa consists of three neighborhoods: Jackson Heights, Belmont Heights, and College Hill. All three neighborhoods were incorporated into East Tampa as a segregated community for Blacks in the early 1900s. Through Jim Crow segregation (1911–1950s), redlining (1930s–1940s), urban renewal (1960s–1980s) and, most recently, the recession and housing crisis (2007–2010+), the community has been structurally disadvantaged for over a century (Aaronson et al., 2021). Today, the neighborhood has an aging housing stock, is blighted by vacant and abandoned lots polluted with solid waste and is surrounded by numerous businesses that produce hazardous waste. Roughly 90% of the approximately 38,000 residents in the community represent minority groups, primarily Black (73%) and Hispanic (18%). Median household income has remained steady over the past several years at roughly $22,000, with 50% of households below the 2024 federal poverty level.

2.2. Interdisciplinary Teaching, Learning and Research

In 2023, graduate and undergraduate students from engineering, anthropology, urban planning, public health, and social science majors at the University of South Florida participated in one of two semester-long courses—Environmental Justice (EJ) seminar (taught in the Anthropology Department during the spring semester) and Envision Sustainable Communities (Envision) course, (taught in the Environmental Engineering Department during the fall semester). Both courses were designed as service learning courses based on the principal of “reciprocal engagement,” in which student learning outcomes were aligned with community-identified needs and desires (Smith-Tolken & Bitzer, 2017). The collaboration across the Environmental Engineering and Anthropology departments is derived from the urgent need for interdisciplinary engineers, scientists and thought leaders to address complex societal issues. For more than a decade, relationships between these two departments and the community have been deeply rooted and intertwined. These two courses were selected in particular because of their intersectional care for people and the environment. Engineers often focus on the environmental and economic aspects of sustainability but place less focus on social aspects opting for social superficiality instead of reaching for nuanced and tailored solutions. Alternatively, anthropologists and social scientists have deep social understanding but do not always have the technical training needed to produce infrastructural solutions. Creating curriculum-approved courses in both departments invites students into these spaces, making room for dialogue that does not occur in discipline specific courses. While these environmental engineering and anthropology courses were chosen for interdisciplinary teaching and service learning, we also posit that this type of interdisciplinary learning can occur across all engineering, STEM and social fields.

Nine of the undergraduate students in the Envision Sustainable Communities course were enrolled in another ABET-accredited 2000-level undergraduate environmental engineering course (Fall semester, 2022) (Engineering Healthy and Sustainable Environments) where students were introduced to sustainability and environmental justice. The first author was the co-instructor for the Engineering Healthy and Sustainable Environments course, the Environmental Justice Seminar (anthropology course) and the Envision Sustainable Communities course (environmental engineering course). The other co-instructors for the Environmental Justice seminar and the Envision Sustainable Communities courses were the third and fifth co-authors (tenured faculty in their respective departments). Co-teaching content across two different departments strengthened interdisciplinary learning for students, especially engineers (Rooks et al., 2022; Klaassen et al., 2023).

Teaching in both the Envision course and the EJ seminar was relational (Bell, 2022), especially for engineering students who took both the Engineering Healthy and Sustainable Environments course and the Envision course. Engineering Healthy and Sustainable Environments had 18 students enrolled and half of those students took the Envision course the following year. At the end of the Engineering Healthy and Sustainable Environments course, students were presented with an opportunity to conduct research with the first and third author and six students accepted. Whether students enrolled in a course with interdisciplinary teaching or were individually mentored in research opportunities, students were able to participate in community engagement at varying levels (Henderson et al., 2024).

2.3. Environmental Justice Seminar

For the Environmental Justice (EJ) seminar, students considered how environmental burdens lead to public health problems and how this relationship is linked to structural racism, such as through, for example, redlining and other discriminatory land use planning processes (Wells, 2025). They also considered the ways and extent to which this relationship is perpetuated through local, state, and federal laws and policies as well as processes that governing bodies develop to implement these regulations (Alexander et al., 2021). As students worked through literature and case studies on these topics, they were encouraged to develop a critical perspective for themselves that leads to questioning the histories and trajectories of human–environmental relations as shaped by race, class, and politics (D’Arcangelis & Sarathy, 2015). Students were also challenged to consider their own positionality (e.g., how their identities shape their social location vis-a-vis other actors) in the development of this critical interpretive lens (hooks, 1994). To facilitate this awareness, the course centered around a university/community-engaged intervention (pairing a culturally rich local community with an academic institution), which aligned student learning outcomes with the needs of a community (Schensul, 2010).

Previous iterations of the course worked with communities on interventions related to brownfields (Lehigh et al., 2020), drinking water insecurity (Vidmar et al., 2023), and groundwater contamination (Caballero et al., 2024). For the spring 2023 cohort, students worked with community residents in East Tampa, a historically Black community experiencing a range of environmental justice challenges, on community-identified desires for the beautification of stormwater ponds (Henderson et al., 2024). In this effort, students conducted oral history interviews (Hernandez et al., 2017) of community residents to learn about their experiences with stormwater ponds and perceptions of social and environmental challenges around beautification. The primary objectives of the course were to (1) learn about the history of the environmental justice movement and core concepts that have helped frame it; (2) gain skills in social science research methods for documenting environmental injustices, including interviews, participant observation, archival research and document analysis, and spatial mapping tools; and (3) apply these understandings and skills to local environmental justice challenges in East Tampa. The greater goal of these efforts was to create visual and digital ethnographies of environmental justice for residents of East Tampa to share their personal stories and their desires for redevelopment. Ultimately, the class served as a foundational component for the Envision Sustainable Communities course (see below) that some students took in the following semester.

2.4. Envision Sustainable Communities Course

The Envision Sustainable Communities (Envision) course prepared students for the Envision Sustainability Professional (ENV SP) exam and credentialing offered by the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure (ISI, 2018). Once students pass the Envision exam and receive their credentials, they become Envision Specialists. The cost of the Envision certification exam ($75) was covered for students using institutional funding. Envision Specialists use the Envision framework to comprehensively evaluate infrastructure projects for sustainability through five major categories: (1) quality of life; (2) leadership; (3) resource allocation; (4) natural world; and (5) climate and resilience. Once projects are evaluated, they receive an Envision designation (verified, bronze, silver, gold or platinum). In this context, students in the class were challenged to consider and develop sustainable and equitable infrastructure solutions to environmental justice challenges alongside community residents. Conceptual “co-designs” around a local stormwater pond were developed between students and residents. During the semester, community leaders and instructors took students on tours of stormwater ponds in East Tampa to examine the social and ecological differences between accessible ponds with positive environmental services and recreational amenities and inaccessible (fenced) ponds. Students were prompted to create conceptual designs for one stormwater pond based on community needs that would support an existing community garden and enhance safety and accessibility while providing space for community gatherings.

Previous iterations of the Envision course addressed stormwater pond beautification and a proposed highway expansion project in the neighboring community of Tampa Heights that was previously criticized for its lack of community engagement in this predominantly Black neighborhood (Rodriguez & Ward, 2018). For the current cohort, students continued the participatory research they began in the EJ seminar focused on stormwater pond redevelopment challenges and other collateral needs. Students were asked to review the oral histories of East Tampa residents and discuss links to the designed and built environment. They role-played and led discussions using these accounts, identifying transportation needs for seniors, accessibility of spaces (especially for persons with limited abilities), the importance of encouraging active sports for both the youth and the elderly, and the need to reconnect community members using public spaces and buildings for community events. The primary objectives of the course were to (1) learn about the ISI’s Envision Sustainable Infrastructure Framework (ISI, 2018) in the context of Environmental Engineering Grand Challenges (NASEM, 2019) and how the framework’s elements align with engineering design for community needs; (2) gain skills for working collaboratively with communities and other stakeholders on environmental engineering interventions, such as stakeholder mapping, community asset inventories, focus groups, and qualitative analysis; and (3) apply these understandings and skills to local environmentally related challenges in East Tampa.

2.5. Attitudinal Surveys

At the beginning and end of each semester for both classes, students were invited to complete a person-centered attitudinal survey with open-ended questions using a formal survey instrument distributed online via Qualtrics (IRB Study 3620). There were 20 students in the EJ seminar: 18 participated in the pre-class survey and 7 participated in the post class assessment. Of the 35 students enrolled in the Envision course, 15 completed the pre-class assessment and 30 completed the post-class assessment (Table 1). The surveys were designed to examine students’ knowledge and perceptions of environmental justice, structural racism, and community engagement before and after the course. The post-class surveys paralleled the pre-class surveys and included the past tense for each question. The greater goal of this exercise was to explore the ways and extent to which the service learning experience impacted students’ understanding of justice, racism, and community. Questions included the following: (1) How do you define “environmental justice”? (2) What do you expect to learn about “environmental justice” in this course? (3) How would you define “racism”? (4) What do you expect to learn about “racism” in this course? (5) How would you define community? (6) What do you expect to learn about “community” in this course? (7) How do you expect your involvement in this course will support your academic/professional growth? (8) How do you expect your involvement in this course will support your personal life experience? (9) What are the challenges you expect to experience with this course in terms of the curriculum? (10) How will you apply what you learn in this course to working in the community? (11) What do you think your most valuable academic experience might be this semester? (12) What do you think your most valuable community experience might be this semester?

Table 1. Demographic Information of Students Enrolled in the Environmental Justice Seminar and the Envision Sustainable Communities Course.

Student Demographics	Environmental Justice	Envision Sustainable Communities
Total number of students	20	35
Undergraduate	11 (55%)	28 (80%)
Graduate	9 (45%)	7 (20%)
Civil or Environmental Engineering Major	2 (10%)	33 (94%)
Anthropology Major	10 (50%)	1 (3%)
Other Majors *	8 (40%)	1 (3%)
Female Students	18 (90%)	13 (37%)
Male Students	2 (10%)	22 (63%)
Enrolled in Sustainable Communities Course	2 (10%)	-
Enrolled in Environmental Justice Seminar	-	2 (6%)

* Liberal arts, library and information science, urban and regional planning, psychology, health science, public health, biology, and geography.

Content analysis (Bernard et al., 2017) of the survey results was used to identify learning gains resulting from student experiences in the community. Content analysis is a set of methods for systematically coding and analyzing qualitative data to identify explicit and implicit meanings (i.e., manifest and latent content) and for using these meanings to evaluate specific ideas (Bernard et al., 2017). In the case of our analysis, we used content analysis to explore students’ perceptions of community, environmental justice, and structural racism. We also used content analysis to assess students’ perceptions about their overall experiences (both academic and with regard to community engagement) in the class. As we sought to understand student experiences in our specific courses, the content analysis presented here is exploratory (rather than explanatory) in nature and is summarized in the case-by-variable matrix in the results section.

3. Results

3.1. Environmental Justice Seminar Findings and Analysis

At the start of the semester, students were generally excited to take the course and expected to learn how to apply skills from the EJ seminar towards their future career, directing them in a meaningful way to know how to work with communities (Table 2). The majority expected that their community experience would provide hands-on or “real-life” experience hearing from residents to help them with the environmental justice challenges (77% of respondents and 64% of all enrolled students). A student described what they were looking forward to for the class: “I think my most valuable community experience this semester will being venturing out in the Tampa area to discuss an issue outside of college and academia to use what I’ve learned so far to see the real-life effects of what I could personally accomplish after school.”

Table 2. Content Analysis from the Pre & Post Surveys in the Environmental Justice Seminar. A total of 18 students participated in the pre-class assessment and 7 participated in the post-class assessment. The “n” values below the themes correspond to the theme occurrence.

Topics	Pre-Assessment Themes	Student Response Examples	Post-Assessment Themes	Student Response Examples
How would you define community?			What did you learn about community in this course?
Community	Shared attribute, Commonality, Care (n = 13)	“Community refers to the group one identifies themselves as belonging to. It can coalesce because of a shared location, interest, or any other commonality.”	Difference and Fluidity (n = 5)	“A community is not a homogenous entity, there are many individuals with different interests, priorities, and goals that have to be balanced and considered.”
How would you define environmental justice?			What did you learn about environmental justice in this course?
Environmental Justice	Environmental hazards, health crises, certain communities (n = 13)	“Environmental Justice is the systemic issue that works to compensate and redeem groups that have suffered major health crises due to hazardous facilities being disproportionately assembled in their communities by the facts of class and more so race.”	Policy, politics, decisions (n = 5)	“I learned how much environmental justice is tied to past policies and decisions. Decisions and policies made in times when racism was considered okay continue today.”
How would you define racism?			What did you learn about racism in this course?
Structural Racism	Discrimination, Prejudice, Use of Binaries (e.g., direct/personal vs. structural/systemic, conscious vs. unconscious, physical vs. emotional) (n = 15)	“Racism is the unfair, inequitable, and historic treatment of a group based on their skin color, race, and/or ethnicity. It occurs not only in personal interactions between people but also as a larger systemic issue which places certain people more at a disadvantage than others.” “Preferential treatment of individuals of a certain race, whether purposeful or implicit.”	Connected to policy and environment (n = 6)	“I learned that there are more burdens that people experiencing interpersonal and institutional racism face than just social and financial. Racism also impacts people’s health and wellbeing because of issues like environmental racism placing a disproportionate amount of toxic waste facilities in communities of color because the majority white population didn’t want them.”
How do you expect your involvement in this course will support your academic/professional growth?			How has your involvement in this course supported your academic/professional growth?
Academic Experience	Skills and Experiences, Application, Learning (n = 14)	“I think it will give me some great hands-on experience in the community that I haven’t had before which will benefit me when I do field work and community work in the future” “I hope that what I learn in this course will help me determine where to go from here. I am interested in sustainability, community spaces (specifically co-living spaces), and environmental anthropology.”	Learning and skill implementation (n = 6)	“Through this course I have been able to greatly expand on my knowledge of environmentalism and race in the United States… Through this experience I have begun to solidify my personal academic and professional goals as I approach graduate school and the job market.”
What do you think your most valuable community experience might be this semester?			What was your most valuable community experience this semester?
Community Experience	Real-life: Hearing and Helping (n = 10)	“Most definitely hearing from residents and community members first-hand and working with them to address their concerns. I love the opportunity to take the learning out of the classroom and actually apply what we know…”	Collaboration and relationship building (n = 3)	“I appreciated seeing the looks on the Jazzy Seniors faces when our videos included direct quotes from when we interviewed them. I started off the semester with being unsure with just how much the course was actually going to work together with them. I heavily valued seeing the Seniors, especially the ones I interviewed, seeing their own contributions in our videos. It made me realize how much the communities that work together with universities appreciate seeing their voice and power in these projects. Reading about that relationship is different than seeing it and being in that relationship in person.”

At the beginning of the semester, understanding of community centered on discussion of shared attributes and commonalities that ranged from socioeconomic and geographic to racial groups and an emphasis on communities of care (83% of respondents). Students entered the EJ seminar with a foundational understanding of environmental justice, emphasizing how communities of color face disproportionate burdens of environmental threats and health challenges. They also highlighted their desire to learn skills and increase their knowledge of methodology and theory of environmental justice to apply it in practice (Table 2).

After the class, students’ understandings centered on how political decisions connect with the emergence and continuance of environmental injustice in communities across the globe. At the end of the semester, these definitions continued; however, most of the survey respondents highlighted how communities are heterogenous and fluid across different socioeconomic, political, and physical geographies. One student remarked that environmental justice entails

“Ensuring communities (especially historically marginalized communities) have the opportunity and voice to participate in ensuring their communities are safe and clean places to live. Either through remediation (clean ups, resource investment, legal cases) or preventative (policy, legislation, zoning) work.”

Students’ initial understandings of structural racism focused on describing discrimination, prejudice, and the use of binaries such as interpersonal vs. structural racism, or conscious vs. unconscious racism. In the post-assessment, students drew connections between race, racism, and the environment (Table 2). Students also developed an understanding of how the aggregated effects of racism lead to and perpetuate deleterious health outcomes for communities of color. Overwhelmingly, at the end of the semester, students emphasized that learning about environmental justice concepts and then being able to apply them to a project with the community that consisted of deep relationship building and collaboration was immensely valuable in their academic and community experience.

For the final project, students in the EJ seminar produced visual ethnography videos that combined the oral history interview data with community elders and archival research on the East Tampa community (Wells et al., 2022). Students organized themselves into groups to focus on the past, present, and possible future of stormwater ponds in East Tampa with an emphasis on environmental and infrastructural (in)justice. Students studying the neighborhood’s past utilized information from oral history interviews, archival newspapers, and maps to understand the social and environmental histories of East Tampa. Students learned that this history is marked by redlining and residential racial segregation, where the community was labeled as a hazardous environment (Nelson & Winling, 2023). Stormwater ponds were associated with mosquitoes at a time when yellow fever was prevalent in East Tampa. East Tampa was more rural than urban, and the construction of highway I-4 demolished homes in many neighborhoods (Parnell, 2022). Parks with ponds were regarded as areas for frequent community gathering and engagement. Community elders reminisced about the sense of community among residents and lack of crime but recalled how normalized segregation was in the city.

Students researching present conditions combined interview data, newspaper articles, and government documents to highlight the challenges residents in East Tampa face today. They discussed the likelihood of gentrification with the increase in new development that has raised the cost of housing in the community. They also discussed how aging infrastructure from their homes, streets, roads, and sidewalks have resulted in flooding issues. Homeownership rates have declined, leading to a rise in rent, as many Black families who owned homes are losing ownership when their children choose not to keep the property. There are a range of stormwater ponds in East Tampa; however, only a few are fully redeveloped. The undeveloped stormwater ponds are fenced off and are considered “eyesores” in the community. Seniors also mentioned how dangerous traffic and road conditions are in certain areas, describing a need for traffic calming infrastructure and filling potholes. Seniors expressed alarm about crime and violence experienced in the neighborhood.

A final group of students evaluated the hopes and demands for the future of East Tampa by analyzing the senior oral history interviews, participant observation data, and city planning documents. Overall, residents desire infrastructure development that enhances the community without resulting in gentrification. For example, community elders are expecting the development of a senior center and improved traffic safety infrastructure. Many hope that the city follows through on their promise to the community with infrastructure development and crime prevention. At the end of the semester, students shared these past, present, and future videos with the community at a community meeting luncheon and the experience proved to be transformative. One student in the post-assessment survey reflected:

“I appreciated seeing the looks on the Seniors faces when our videos included direct quotes from when we interviewed them. I started off the semester with being unsure with just how much the course was actually going to work together with them. I heavily valued seeing the Seniors, especially the ones I interviewed, seeing their own contributions in our videos. It made me realize how much the communities that work together with universities appreciate seeing their voice and power in these projects. Reading about that relationship is different than seeing it and being in that relationship in person.”

Several students shared their thoughts about their experience in the Environmental Justice seminar, and in particular community engagement with the seniors of East Tampa:

“This class was really interesting for me as an engineer because I’ve never taken an anthropology class before. It was the first time we’ve really gotten to interact with the community as our main focus.”

“It is one thing to sit in class every day and read a ton of research papers, but it is a different thing when you come to the community, and you sit down with people and actively listen.”

Overall, students highlighted the joy of working directly with community members (Table 2).

3.2. Envision Sustainable Communities Course Findings and Analysis

The Envision Sustainable Communities (Envision) course helped engineering students become credentialed Envision Specialist through the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure, but as the post-assessment results illustrate students learned how their profession connects with environmental injustices and how to work with communities to design infrastructure interventions (Table 3). For the Envision course, student survey responses illustrated a growth in understanding of community, environmental justice, and racism particularly related to infrastructure and its effects on communities. Similarly to students in the EJ Seminar, in the pre-class assessments, students in the Envision course defined community as a group of individuals who shared commonalities (87% of respondents). This understanding remained throughout the semester but tended to focus on connection within or between communities at the end of the semester (Table 3).

Table 3. Content Analysis from the Pre & Post Surveys in the Envision Sustainable Communities course. A total of 15 students participated in the pre-class assessment and 30 participated in the post-class assessment. The “n” values below the themes correspond to the theme occurrence.

Topics	Pre-Assessment Themes	Student Response Examples	Post-Assessment Themes	Student Response Examples
How would you define community?			What did you learn about community in this course?
Community	Commonality, Group (n = 13)	“I define community as a group or people that share a common or common beliefs.”	Connection, Challenges (n = 19)	“This course helped me recognize that community isn’t just to define groups in same neighborhood or areas, but those who share a background, belief, ideals, and any values that connect them together.” “Ways infrastructure can help or harm community”
How would you define environmental justice?			What did you learn about environmental justice in this course?
Environmental Justice	Environmental Protection and Fairness (n = 10)	“The process or processes which help protect all environments from unjust, unethical, or damaging practices by implementing and enforcing laws and regulations.” “I define environmental justice as the issue of fairness in the case of environmental protection and laws set forth.”	Equal Rights, Decision-Making, Infrastructure, Envision principles (n = 15)	“This course taught me the method to achieve environmental justice, through the Envision framework.” “I learned that environmental justice is a concept that aims to ensure that all people have equal rights and opportunities to participate in environmental decisions that affect their lives.” “I learned that environmental justice affects people livelihoods, health, environment, and money. It’s not just something that’s ‘unfair’.”
How would you define racism?			What did you learn about racism in this course?
Structural Racism	Discrimination, mistreatment, negative opinion or feeling (n = 13)	“Unjust treatment to any individual based on their ethnicity or background” “Discrimination towards someone or a group due to their race”	Within Infrastructure (n = 13)	“I learned that the environment and how communities are built actually plays a big role in racism.” “It is reproduced and reinforced in infrastructure, the built environment and often unconsciously”
How do you expect your involvement in this course will support your academic/professional growth?			How has your involvement in this course supported your academic/professional growth?
Academic Experience	Broaden perspective, opportunities (n = 13)	“I think it will open my mind to things I had never considered before allowing me to grow.” “It will provide a perspective that traditional courses won’t on how what we do as engineers impacts those with a less powerful voice.”	Perspective shift, Reflection (n = 19)	“I’ve learned how to engage better with a community for infrastructure projects which is very beneficial as an engineer about to enter industry.”
What do you think your most valuable community experience might be this semester?			What was your most valuable community experience this semester?
Community Experience	Openness and uncertainty (n = 6)	“Connecting with individuals and hearing there concerns and letting it mold the type of engineer I want to become.” “Discovering new ways to contribute to my community.” “I am currently unsure and excited to find out”	Community Partnership, Field Trip (n = 22)	“Meeting and talking with the representatives of the project we are working on, to actually gain a realistic perspective rather than pure numbers.” “The most valuable academic experience I had was the 22nd street field trip because of how eye opening it was to see the community project was based on.”

At the beginning of the semester, 33% of students (66% of survey respondents) understood environmental justice as environmental protection and fairness focusing on the intrinsic value of protecting the environment. Engineering students’ definitions of environmental justice generally lacked understanding of environmental justice in relation to specific communities or people affected by pollution and environmental hazards. At the end of the semester, their definitions expanded to identify issues of equity and access for people and the environment, with an emphasis on the interconnected nature of infrastructure in communities and how environmental justice can create, reinforce, or challenge these issues (Table 3). Students emphasized how infrastructure can be a source of separation or isolation, with one student stating:

“In my opinion EJ means everyone has the right to have clean water to drink, fresh air to breathe, nice neighborhood, all the necessary things that everyone needs should be near the place they live, and I mean infrastructure (highways, bridges, …) should be a connector between people not a divider.

Students described racism as discrimination or mistreatment in the pre-assessment, but in the post-assessment they predominantly focused on how racism is more than just beliefs and rather can be practiced or reinforced within infrastructures in communities. One student emphasized, “It [racism] is reproduced and reinforced in infrastructure, the built environment and often unconsciously.” Jiménez et al. (2019) investigated engineering faculty and students’ perceptions around the connection between engineering and social justice issues such as peace, gender equality, care for the environment, poverty and public safety. The authors argue for engineering faculty to connect how societal problems are sometimes caused by engineering decisions (Jiménez et al., 2019). In a project-based mechanics design course, similar to the Envision course, an engineering for social justice framework was implemented into the curriculum where students were tasked with designing an amusement park in an urban community (Castaneda et al., 2021). In Castaneda’s course, students did not work directly with community members but were given case studies scenarios (Castaneda et al., 2021). Even though a social justice engineering framework was utilized for the class, few students considered the full impact on communities. Some students recommended that financial compensation would be sufficient to assuage the community if local businesses were dismantled. Other students worked to integrate community concerns into their design but defaulted to sustainability rather than justice and incorporating community needs. One student noted that “environmental justice was too broad and narrowed their idea to focus on sustainability” (Castaneda et al., 2021). Castaneda et al. (2021) remarked that although few students grasped the concepts of social justice in a community context, more of this type of teaching is necessary. For some project-based learning courses, social justice frameworks and hypothetical scenarios are beneficial to introduce concepts of fairness to students. Providing students with exposure to infrastructure systems and opportunities to engage with community members is essential for their academic and professional development.

For this research, combining community engaged teaching and service learning based approaches increased student realization on the impacts of engineered solutions within a community. In the Envision course, students were excited to take the class because of opportunities to learn about engineering from a broader perspective and build upon their design competencies with a practical application. During the initial weeks of the semester, the class went on a tour of local stormwater ponds, one that was fully rehabilitated and one in need of improvement. In their post-class assessments and in-person conversations, students expressed joy and excitement to participate in a field trip (Table 3). Several students remarked that they had not been on class field trips since their early K-12 education or since entering college. The tour of the stormwater pond led by the course instructor and community leader broadened their perspective on local infrastructure issues. During the field trip, many students felt fatigued while standing in direct sunlight since the sidewalk had little shading. Students huddled under nearby trees to seek shade while intently focused on hearing the community leader over the loud rush of traffic less than 10 feet away. Although students were told to prepare beforehand, the reality of being at the non-rehabilitated stormwater pond ultimately overrode any prior recommendations. As community members walked by the student tour group, several students noted that there were few bus stops and the fencing around the pond could be a danger as a toddler attempted to climb the fence. Although not inherently dangerous, the space for the stormwater pond was not welcoming in contrast to the 2nd rehabilitated pond, with shading, a boardwalk, gazebos and much more wildlife. Students’ dispositions changed once they entered the rehabilitated pond. They were confounded at the stark differences between the two ponds in the same neighborhood. When asked what their most valuable academic or community experience was during the semester, students responded that:

“Visiting the stormwater ponds earlier this semester, it’s the first field trip I’ve had since middle school. Very educational.”

“The most valuable academic experience I had was the 22nd street field trip because of how eye opening it was to see the community project was based on.”

After meeting with a community leader and tour of the stormwater ponds, students were asked to create conceptual (re)designs for one of the stormwater ponds in East Tampa; something first commissioned by the community over a decade ago with no implementation to date. Throughout the semester, students learned the social and environmental history of the stormwater ponds. Class materials included student videos from the EJ seminar and interview transcripts from community residents. During one class session, students were divided into six groups and utilized their knowledge of the Envision Sustainable Infrastructure credits and experience visiting the pond to design innovative solutions for improving the stormwater pond area. Designs focused mainly on health and safety of the surrounding community with an emphasis on (1) pedestrian-focused infrastructure (2) socioeconomic opportunities; (3) education; (4) environmental enhancements; and (5) technical water management solutions. Safety designs included street–sidewalk barriers (e.g., bollards, and creating a boardwalk), speedbumps on the adjacent roads, shaded areas, drinking water fountains, bathrooms and streetlights.

Socioeconomic and cultural improvements included naming the pond in honor of a resident who played a key role in fostering the growth and development of East Tampa to continue a tradition started by the East Tampa community. Other designs included educational and historical signage about stormwater ponds and native ecology, a community space with a pavilion, barbeque grills and tables for events. Student designs also included an expanded community garden, exercise stations, playground, and a dog park while environmental enhancements incorporated trash and recycling bins, recycled plastic benches, and native plant species.

One group advocated for a swan paddle boat rental enterprise that could provide recreational and income-oriented activities for residents. In a post-class reflection, a student commented on this concept, “I quite like the boating idea. While swan boats may not be best, kayaks or row boats may work. A simple boat house for them would also not be too difficult to install.” Engineered solutions included water filtering plants, re-grading the slope of the pond, filling in the northside of the pond, extending the pipes, creating bioswales between the sidewalk and pond, moving the fencing closer to the pond hidden with natural plant barriers, and more. One student in the class reflected on the innovative concepts that emerged:

“The [class was] rich with creativity and engineering design ideas. I enjoyed seeing the different group’s ideas for the stormwater pond. There were many great additions that I did not think of myself such as the addition of speed bumps and raised crosswalks to help with pedestrian safety. The boardwalk idea around the entire lake was another great idea since the slopes are so steep.”

Stormwater design enhancements were translated into a class project and final reports. Students then shared these potential solutions with the community advocate and resident they previously heard from on the field trip. Students created PowerPoint presentations and shared their design enhancements for the pond during a class lecture and received feedback from the same community leader who led them during the stormwater tour ponds. This experiential ‘real-life’ exercise allowed students to engage with a community leader and tailor their engineering solutions with feedback and sustainable infrastructure design in mind. Students collaboratively designed for social and environmental justice by applying community perspectives and the personal experiences of community members in their creative and equitable solutions (Brown & Bauer, 2021; Tharakan, 2020). As another student reflected:

“I enjoyed collaborating with my classmates to see ways which we could enhance the park on 22nd St and we had a lot. I’m glad most of us had close to the same kinds of ideas and tried to promote more involvement for the community. This is the kind of thinking that has not been as prominent in the field of engineering. This also shows me that we will be the generation to take more account of communities wants and needs when we are trying to develop infrastructure.”

Similarly, when asked about their most valuable community experience, students emphasized their appreciation to work on a project with community members.

“Meeting and talking with the representatives of the project we are working on, to actually gain a realistic perspective rather than pure numbers.”

“My most valuable community experience was taking the field trip to 22nd street and hearing from community partners on the issues they face everyday.”

Working with and meeting community members enhanced experiential learning. As most students were juniors and seniors, they built upon their knowledge from other engineering classes to synthesize tailored solutions for a local community issue. This community and project-based approach combined with technical aspects formed a layered experience for their class projects. Layering community engagement in the Envision course consisted of (1) in-person lectures; (2) community engagement and partnerships; (3) class trips; (4) reflective thinking; and (5) contextualized problem solving. Students thought comprehensively about coursework when they were taught by community leaders and applied their designs to a local problem. Proximity to community members and exposure to local infrastructure issues was a critical factor in students grasping the impacts of engineered designs. Engineering students need partnerships with communities they design infrastructure for.

Weekly written post-class reflections were assigned based on the lectures, reading and video materials. Bloom’s taxonomy was used to illustrate how higher levels of reasoning are needed to advance from understanding concepts to reflective thinking and pragmatic applications. Contextualized challenges from the community related to infrastructure and stormwater ponds were presented to students and they were prompted to maintain a sustainable and interdisciplinary mindset while being personally reflexive. Students were also challenged to consider their own intersectionality and positionality and how their perspective and privilege influence their decision making (Suhendra & St John, 2023; Secules et al., 2021). This type of layered thinking shifts the mental model for engineers to comprehend how to positively create systems and infrastructure that promote community formation and benefits society.

Over the span of the semester, students holistically contemplated their learned and lived experiences as engineers. Most students were juniors and seniors, and the Envision course inspired them to think about the culmination of their undergraduate classes. Design classes function as an aggregate course where students are tasked with combining the summation of the technical skills acquired over the course of their undergraduate degree. Design classes, as they are intended, pair with utilities and agencies within a locality to address an engineering issue or improve a technical process. These design classes work well to strengthen and unify technical skills but often lack connections to communities. Most environmental engineering design projects uphold the economic and environmental aspects of sustainability but are lacking in the social aspect. As engineers, the structures we design significantly impact neighborhoods and shape community formation. It is paramount that students comprehend how engineered infrastructure positively or negatively influences community development; and students grasped that concept in the Envision course.

In the post-class assessments, students described their shift in mindset as one student explained, “I’ve been exposed to more real-world impacts that my profession has on people.” Like students in the focus groups described by Jiménez et al. (2019), engineering students in the Envision course perceived a “moral duty of the engineering profession with society, regarding issues of social justice.” Despite following a code of ethics, many engineering programs do not center human experiences in engineering program curricula (Shannon & Mina, 2021).

Some students emphasized the importance of engagement with communities and their hope to assist with engineering solutions in the future and discussed how they learned from the ISI Envision framework and hope to use it in their career. Goggins and Hajdukiewicz (2022) describe their facilitation of over 300 community-engaged, sustainability-based engineering projects with university students. In their evaluation survey, students emphasized the importance of working with community members on projects with deliverables because it was an opportunity to get “a look at real world engineering practices” and “I feel as if I have actually completed an engineering project that will be relevant to my future studies.” Similarly, a student in Envision explained, “It has made me more aware of these issues and making me want to bring about a change in the field of engineering.” Goggins and Hajdukiewicz (2022) explain how a community-engaged engineering project approach is not only important for sustainability but also assists in engineering students’ development for their future careers. Although this research focused on two semesters—one of the EJ seminar and one of the Envision course—both the Envision and EJ seminar have continued to partner with East Tampa and communities within the state of Florida and internationally in Belize.

4. Discussion

Community engaged teaching and service learning does not have to be relegated to upper-level electives or capstone courses. Contextualized community engaged teaching can be incorporated into upper- and lower-level core courses and electives in all engineering disciplines. Efforts can be made to initiate building relationships and addressing short- or long-term issues for local communities. Incorporating community engaged research and service learning in engineering curricula is a small but impactful way to address injustices. This type of learning creates future engineers who can meet the needs of the most vulnerable and incorporate practical and holistic innovations.

Service learning and community engagement is an increasingly important means of structuring collaborations between universities and communities (Bourke, 2013; Lundahl, 2012). While environmental engineering, anthropology and service learning might seem like natural partners, very few engineers or anthropologists have written about their service learning experiences (Jessee et al., 2015; Medeiros & Guzman, 2016; Natarajarathinam et al., 2021), and even fewer have been critical of service learning as an instrument of community intervention (Alexander et al., 2021). At the heart of this reflection is a fundamental set of questions: Who exercises power? Who is empowered and by whom? These are key questions we ask for sustainability and equitability concerns (Avelino & Wittmayer, 2016), and here we argue that we have a responsibility to turn these questions on ourselves to consider reflexively how the tools we use, such as service learning and action research, are differently positioned in university–community power structures that enable or constrain the hard work of environmental justice (Wood & McAteer, 2017; Wang & LaDousa, 2024).

The EJ seminar and Envision course were both service learning electives in their respective departments that integrated environmental and social justice. Post-course surveys in both the EJ seminar and the Envision course revealed that students’ insights were broadened to be interdisciplinary in their approach to course work and to consider impacted communities in their decision making. This finding supports that of Bielefeldt and Silverstein (2021), who found that the introduction of community perspectives into engineering courses yielded a change in students’ perspective regarding engineering. Feedback from students in the post-course survey supports the need for these or other engineering courses that incorporate environmental and social justice into the curriculum. An undergraduate environmental engineer, emphasized how important community engagement was in their experience in the EJ seminar: “What was most amazing to me after interacting with the seniors is the story they told me of resilience and how a community can turn into a family.”

Chen et al. (2023) examined how social justice has been integrated into engineering curricula in three case studies. Each case had a mission of developing critical awareness of social justice and equity challenges within engineering while students led this interest and inclusion of social justice and equity topics within their education. For example, students were motivated to include diversity and equity issues because of sociocultural events in the world such as the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement (Chen et al., 2023, p. 364). Students in these courses and training found the curriculum to be transformative for how they envisioned their discipline and future careers. Chen et al. (2023) also described the difficulty in including social justice initiatives in engineering curriculum and argued that these courses should be integrated as required courses rather than electives because of how integral technological interventions are with people and society, and thus, social justice.

Reynante (2022) argues that a design-for-justice mindset in engineering education is a requisite for achieving meaningful community-engaged learning with students. The design-for-justice paradigm’s four key principles are “critical reflection on power and privilege,” “recognizing community-based design knowledge and practices,” “ensuring fair and meaningful community participation in design decisions” and “identifying and altering the structural conditions that engender inequity” (Reynante, 2022). Importantly, both courses in our study incorporated aspects of this design. The Envision course had weekly readings and written assignments that pushed students to critically think about justice and sustainability in engineering, which came up in the evaluations as a major challenge in the course. However, as an engineering student in the Envision course said, “At first it was so hard for me to read the reading[s] and write every week but right now I feel more confident in writing and expressing my own opinion, everything was great.” Like students in the research by Reynante (2022), many students in the Envision course and the EJ seminar reflected on their own life experiences, especially those relating to inequity, connecting with the readings and engagement with East Tampa residents. An Envision student reflected, “It [the course] has made me understand the issues that I have faced in my life more in terms of infrastructure and development in my community.” Another student in the same course explained, “It [the class] allowed me to share experiences from my personal life with others and allowed me to get to know some of my classmates.” Students such as this one valued and expressed empathy for the experiences of their peers (Koehler et al., 2020). Over each semester, the classroom environment grew increasingly open and authentic as students felt safe to share their personal experiences and engage with the stories they heard from peers. In their reflections, students would often refer to comments made by a classmate and explain how it impacted what they learned in class.

Across the higher education landscape, service learning plays a central role in community engagement for colleges and universities (Smith-Tolken & Bitzer, 2017), and increasingly in engineering education (Natarajarathinam et al., 2021). This is evident, for instance, in university administrations through university strategic plans, the creation of vice-presidents for engagement and offices/departments of community outreach. Perhaps most importantly, the Carnegie Foundation’s institutional classification for “Community Engagement” is often used by colleges and universities to attract students and faculty, external funding, higher program rankings, and other educational capital that fuels the education marketplace. These practices open new questions about the role of service learning in higher education (Canaan & Shumar, 2008). Numerous critiques have emerged recently, for example, questioning the substance and sustainability of community engagements by service learning (Marullo et al., 2009; Raddon & Harrison, 2015; Stoecker, 2016). Wang and LaDousa (2024) argue that “doing something” (i.e., service learning) is conceived as ‘good,’ but often minimizes reflection on what the “doing” really means for those involved. Through our service learning courses described herein, we seek to build capacity and long-term relationships with the communities we work with and hear their perspectives about collaboration. Several East Tampa community leaders were asked about their experiences conducting oral history interviews with students and learning about possible engineering solutions for one of the stormwater ponds in East Tampa. The president of the Jazzy Seniors group described the importance of the experience for the seniors: “The past is so important to us and especially to the seniors, so it’s always exciting to talk to young people about what we seniors have gone through, and how we plan on focusing on the future.”

5. Conclusions

Community-engaged teaching through the Environmental Justice seminar and Envision Sustainable Communities course became a form of action research that involved long-term commitments with communities stemming from “authentic” needs and perspectives of community residents. This action-oriented research was rooted in local culture and history, developed plans for sustainability, reciprocal learning, and reflexivity at multiple levels (Schensul, 2010). In pursuing this method of teaching and research, it was our intent to build capacity to produce scientific knowledge emerging from communities and people who experience the consequences of structural inequalities in human and environmental health. This kind of “academically engaged engineering” is needed particularly in communities with environmental justice challenges to democratize research by making research tools and results available to vulnerable populations. At the same time, while committed to increasing community capacity and advancing social and environmental justice, community-engaged teaching approaches such as the one described here, can become challenging and contested as notions of community, participation, and engagement are increasingly operationalized within the ideological parameters of higher education (Bourke, 2013). Despite challenges associated with service learning, the pursuit of community engaged research and teaching remains a valuable and worthwhile endeavor in engineering pedagogy. It is the hope of the authors that all readers, engineers, and academics will reconsider how to thoughtfully reposition engineering education to address societal needs especially for disadvantaged communities. Ideally this paper will serve as a charge to all engineers and academics to not only critically rethink engineering education but reposition engineering education to break the mold of academic circuitry to restore and rebuild communities that have been negatively harmed by engineered systems.