Engineering Faculty Engagement in Learning Through Service Summit: Best Practices and Affinity Mapping

A workshop was held in 2011 with the goal of determining the best practices, benefits, and challenges of engaging in Learning Through Service (LTS) activities, with a focus on the engineering faculty perspective. LTS in engineering typically takes two forms: (1) course-based service-learning (SL) projects for real communities or individuals (such as assistive technology devices), and (2) service projects conducted via extracurricular activities such as Engineers Without Borders (EWB). Studying both of these distinct but related activities was of interest since extracurricular service activities such as EWB projects have sometimes moved into engineering courses such as capstone design. The group of engineering faculty and LTS researchers first described what excited them about LTS. Then the group shared ideas on best practices, benefits, and obstacles of LTS design, LTS management, and LTS assessment from the perspective of engineering faculty, the university, students, and communities. This paper focuses on the faculty perspective. These ideas will help faculty engaging in LTS to most effectively design and assess these activities.