From "knowing" to "not knowing": Critical global citizenship education for engineering partnerships

This article was part of a larger study that explored community participants’ perspectives in [Municipality, Country] about the long-term global service learning (GSL) partnership with [Name of university] University’s College of Engineering (Author, year). This article explores the question: From the community participants’ perspectives, what are their educational goals for the university engineering students in this partnership? While I intentionally centered this article on the community participants’ perspectives, I also explored areas of alignment and areas of difference between the different stakeholder groups’ perspectives about learning and knowledge. Although global citizenship surfaced in interviews with both community and university participants, the community participant perspectives push farther than the university administrators/ faculty and call for critical global citizenship education (Andreotti, 2006).

Adapting Global Service-Learning Project and Community Partnership Outcomes Using a “Tele-engineering” Approach in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Water Supply in Developing Countries (WSDC) service-learning course at Purdue University has fostered a strong partnership with the La Vega region in the Dominican Republic since 2012. During this time, an interdisciplinary group of engineering and science students has helped design drinking water treatment systems and the group has developed water, sanitation, and health (WASH) education materials. These WASH education and water safety approaches often have been conducted in person in the past. However, with the state of the COVID-19 pandemic and the inability to travel in the fall and spring semesters of the 2020–2021 academic year, the students have been exploring (1) the impact of the pandemic on the community schools in the La Vega province, (2) the impact of the pandemic on the current water treatment systems, and (3) possible solutions to implement a “virtual installation” of a water treatment system at our newest partner school in the community of Desecho. The coronavirus pandemic has ushered in a new way that we may approach our service-learning experiences in the future. More specifically, in the future, it may be more effective to serve as a “virtual consulting firm” of engineers and consultants, rather than builders, for the implementation and design of the water treatment systems. In this way, we may facilitate a partnership that fosters community agency and solution-based approaches to technical issues are led by local community members.

Cultural Immersion: A Trigger for Transformative Learning

This study examines the cultural immersion experience of 26 students who participated in either a study abroad program (SAP) or global service learning program (GSL). Specifically, the study investigates the transformative learning before, during, and after cultural immersion and the impact it had on participants’ attitudes toward diverse others. The findings indicate that attitude change during and after the cultural immersion experience is a multi-dimensional and unique process that differs for individuals. Additionally, the results suggest that during cultural immersion, certain program factors and personal factors are essential for transformative learning to occur. These factors include intentionality in pre-immersion preparation, the intensity of cultural immersion, and willingness to engage in reflection during post-immersion.