Immersive Community Engagement Experience

As the number of community engagement efforts increase, it is important to understand the impact of these experiences to inform best practices and to ensure that the efforts are positively benefitting all of the stakeholders. Although our program, EPICS, is well-established and has intentionally focused on long-term partnerships, research suggests that immersive experiences can help develop more comprehensive ways of understanding of the community partners. This past summer, our service-learning design program offered a local immersive design experience to a group of 13 students from a variety of majors in a camp for children with disabilities. This paper describes the immersive experience and examines its impact on student learning through analyses of the student reflections and course evaluations. In addition, it describes how these findings can inform this program specifically, as well as other courses and programs using a service-learning pedagogy, especially those that engage in design.