Environmental Engineering Education And Community Service: A Synergistic Partnership

Community-based service learning, the pedagogy of combining education with community service, exists and has value in a number of academic fields. In the past few years, environmental engineering has become a field where community service learning has been found to be synergistic, providing benefits to both the community and academia. This paper highlights ways in which community service learning can become integrated in an environmental engineering curriculum, how service learning can be a valuable tool in educating tomorrow's engineers, and how service learning can be beneficial to the communities and the academic institution(s) involved. The experiences of Tufts University are used as specific examples of how community service learning has enriched the traditional environmental engineering curriculum. Whether applied in courses, in student-driven or university-funded initiatives, or in independent projects, community service learning has benefited students, the instructors, and participating communities. As a result, community service learning projects carry more meaning and encouraged greater learning because they involve a real problem. Additionally, the experience extends student learning beyond the technical aspects of the problem to see what impacts environmental issues have on people with a variety of interests and professional backgrounds. Introduction A component of the mission statement of Tufts University is “to offer to ...students a rigorous education ...that provides the knowledge and intellectual skills to become responsible and productive participants and leaders of society; ... to enhance learning and develop the potential of each student beyond, as well as within, the classroom; to encourage public service by students, faculty and staff, and to integrate service activities and experiential learning with teaching and research...” In order to implement this broad mission, the engineering curriculum must address both "hard" and "soft" aspects of environmental problems. Hard aspects concern the broad range of technical expertise needed to be an effective environmental engineer. Hard aspects in environmental problems come from a variety of technical disciplines including engineering (civil, mechanical, chemical, etc.), natural sciences (geology, chemistry, physics, biology, etc.) and specialized disciplines (microbiology, geochemistry, toxicology, etc.). However, effectively developing solutions to environmental problems often involves expertise in addressing non-technical, or soft, aspects. These aspects involve project management, communication, local and regional politics, economics, and social concerns of affected stakeholders. In most engineering design courses, these soft aspects typically are ignored. However, with respect to a number of environmental problems, soft aspects are just as, if not more, important to the overall success of the chosen environmental design. For the past few years, the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Tufts University has used components of P ge 719.1 community-based service learning to enhance the learning experience of students in its environmental engineering curriculum. This paper describes the pedagogical process used in teaching environmental engineering and highlights some of the ways community-based service learning, the pedagogy of combining education with community service, is used in environmental engineering education at Tufts University. Pedagogical Process Traditional Pedagogical Process Just as there are both hard and soft aspects to environmental engineering problems, both hard and soft constraints exist in developing solutions. For example, in the remediation of contaminated sites, limited physical and chemical information for soil, water, and groundwater represent hard constraints. Soft constraints to the design include evaluating and reconciling the viewpoints of the various community stakeholders. However, in traditional environmental engineering education, the soft constraints are often ignored or not emphasized. This is partly due to the strong technical expertise needed to solve environmental problem solving. It is also due to the desire to specifically satisfy the technical requirements established by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET); namely points a and c of Criterion 3 Program Outcomes and Assessment of ABET's Criteria for Accrediting Engineering Programs. In a typical course, the pedagogical process, as illustrated in Figure 1, would be linear with the emphasis on technical evaluation. Curriculum based on this process would involve homework assignments, exams, and a final project; all emphasizing analysis and evaluation of collected data followed by design calculations. Figure 1 Traditional Pedagogy in an Engineering Design Course New Pedagogical Emphasis However, Criterion 3 also cites the need for engineering students to communicate effectively (point g) and understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global and societal context (point h). Community-based service learning is a pedagogical tool that has helped students develop this deeper appreciation of engineering as well as to communicate their engineering solutions to both a technical and lay audience. The new pedagogical process forces students to consider both hard and soft constraints in environmental engineering design, yet it allows the curriculum to remain true to ABET criteria for technical design. As shown in Figure 2, this methodology is more iterative, making the learning process dynamic and evolving. This process forces the students to “dive deeper” into the problem so as to understand it better.