SLICING AND DICING COMMUNITY ENGAGED LEARNING IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION

Abstract

Community engaged learning (community engagement or service learning) is known to be an effective pedagogy to develop social responsibility and many engineering graduate attributes (outcomes). However, as community engaged learning is a pedagogy still establishing itself in engineering education the scope and boundaries are stillbeing defined.Studies that report on implementation of community engaged learning have sometimes been characterized as anecdotal and isolated. Before we increase focus on work that measures impact and suggests strategic use ofcommunity engaged learning pedagogy – we must begin to tie down the scope, terminology and types of community engaged learning to ensure that a cohesive body of knowledge is formed.This paper is largely a literature review of community engaged learning and how categorizing has been approached. The purpose of this paper is to call attention for the need of more systemized reporting of community engaged learning. In our review, we find that there are two general strategies for distinguishing one type of community engaged learning type from another. In a collaborative spirit, we use the merits of both pproaches to categorizing community engaged learning to conduct a thought- experiment towards finding a middle ground for conventions when reporting community engaged learning experiences.