Representations of 'The Public' in Learning Through Service (LTS) Versus 'Mainstream' Engineering Foundational Professional Documents

“Benefitting society” is a core value in engineering, but the branch of the profession called Learning Through Service (LTS) promotes specifically the teaching of engineering through service – that is, through collaborative, respectful, and mutually beneficial relationships with “the public.” Guided by a theoretical framework of “social imaginaries,” this paper sets out to explore what the most prevalent LTS conceptualizations of “the public” are, and whether and how these conceptualizations differ from conceptualizations of “the public” in “mainstream” engineering. The premise of this research is that how LTS practitioners conceive of “the public” likely informs their conceptions of self, professional duty, professional right, and work with communities; and that knowing what imaginaries of “the public” LTS education fosters is important for throwing into relief ideologies that may underlie the critical, but often unseen and unstated, boundary between LTS and society. Results are provided from a content analysis of 14 engineering documents, chosen for their representational value vis-à-vis the engineering profession’s identity, priorities, vision, and perceived relationship with society. The documents include National Academy of Engineering (NAE) reports, ABET accreditation criteria, disciplinary “Bodies of Knowledge,” engineering codes of ethics, and organizational/programmatic brochures. Qualitative data analysis was used to identify prevalent themes in representations of “the public” across all documents. Emerging codes were broadly categorized into six themes: a) characterizations of “the public,” b) professional duties related to “the public,” c) relationship between engineers and “the public,” d) societal problems in need of engineering solutions, e) engineers’ “social footprint” over time, and f) vision or mission statements. In LTS documents, the three most prevalent codes all fell under the third theme, “relationship between engineers and ‘the public.’” They were that engineers a) benefit “the public,” b) relate to “the public” in a collaborative way, and c) have a significant impact on the work of professionals outside engineering. The first of these three codes – that engineers benefit “the public” – was the most prevalent, by far, in both LTS and “mainstream” engineering documents. However, references to “the public” as unable to meet its basic needs, engineers as problem solvers, and engineers as benefitting the public were more common in the former group of documents than in the latter. The paper closes with a discussion about the potential implications of our findings for both the LTS community and the diverse publics that the engineering profession aims to serve. One of the main questions it raises is whether LTS imaginaries of “the public” depart sufficiently from “mainstream” engineering imaginaries to foster collaborations that “the public” itself recognizes as respectful and beneficial. We view our findings as a step toward deeper understanding about how the LTS community’s construction of “the public” might enhance or weaken engineering practice and, ultimately, how it might support or undermine LTS engineers’ commitment to promote the social good.