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Prior research indicates that empathy can help engineers achieve better outcomes in team-based, design, entrepreneurial, and humanitarian environments. We describe an educational innovation designed to teach engineering students empathic communication skills. Written in the spirit of a propagation (versus dissemination) paradigm, we focus on how the original innovation was adapted to fit into two instructional settings that differed from the first implementation context. We use first person instructor accounts to describe these adaptation processes, including interactions between the developers and the adopters of the innovation, what modifications were necessary to “fit” the innovation into the new settings, and adopter experiences. We conclude with a brief discussion of particularly salient propagation considerations that emerged for the two adopters including, for example, the amount of instructional time available for implementing the empathic communication exercises, and how to achieve student buy-in in different course settings. The two main contributions of this paper are, first, the rich descriptions of how features of the original educational innovation had to be modified to meet the two other settings’ pedagogical goals and, second, an example of how to advance scholarship that supports the propagation of engineering education teaching and learning innovations. 

Engineering design decisions have non-trivial implications, and empathic approaches are one way that engineers can understand and translate the perspectives of diverse stakeholders. Prior literature demonstrates that students must develop empathic skills and beliefs that these skills are important to embody empathic approaches in meaningful ways. However, we have limited understanding of the relationship between students’ beliefs about the value of empathy in engineering decision making and how they describe their reported use of empathic approaches. We collected qualitative data through interviews with ten undergraduate engineering students in capstone design. We found that our participants espoused a belief that empathic approaches are valuable in engineering design decisions. However, while students considered diverse perspectives when describing how they made design decisions, their reported behaviour during design decisions did not demonstrate translation of their empathic understanding. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations to educators and researchers. 

Service-learning (SL) is a promising way to engage and support local communities, educate students as holistic citizens and professionals, and strengthen the connection between higher education and society. However, within engineering education, SL as a pedagogy often falls short of reaching its full potential as a transformational pedagogy. To further our understanding of why SL, in the context of engineering, remains limited, this research characterizes: 1) implicit beliefs about engineering in students’ descriptions of their SL experiences, and 2) the ways in which students’ beliefs manifest within the context of SL in engineering. Our data include rich, contextual descriptions of SL experiences, which enabled us to generate insight into students’ implicit beliefs about engineering and how they manifest in SL contexts. We used an inductive, qualitative approach to analyze focus group and interview data. We found that students predominantly draw on three implicit beliefs about engineering when engaged in SL experiences: (1) Engineering is predominantly technical, (2) Engineering requires deliverables or tangible products, and (3) Engineers are the best problem solvers. These beliefs often manifested problematically, such that they promote university-centered and apolitical SL practice, while reinforcing social hierarchy, leading to community exploitation in support of student development. This study produces empirical evidence that such implicit beliefs are a mechanism that limits the potential of SL by hindering community-centric and justice-oriented practice. However, some students demonstrated their ability to disrupt these beliefs, thereby showing the potential for SL as a pedagogy in engineering to surface implicit and counterproductive beliefs about engineering and achieve SL goals. The beliefs that are salient in SL and the concrete ways in which they manifest for students have implications for how SL is practiced in engineering and the experiences of both students and partner communities. These beliefs impact the extent to which the socio-political elements of the service are addressed, the extent to which SL is university- versus community-centric, and the quality and extent to which the engineering solution is aligned with social justice. The implications of these findings lead to recommendations for future research on how engineering educators might explicitly design SL curricula to identify, address, and dismantle problematic beliefs before they manifest in problematic ways in SL contexts. 

Qualitative outcomes of a pilot study which seeks to investigate the ways and extent to which service-learning impacts the development of empathy in undergraduate engineering students are presented. Service-learning is an experiential education pedagogy in which students engage in activities designed to tackle community needs within structured opportunities to promote learning and development. Community service, teamwork, problem-solving, and reflection are common elements within service-learning activities. This educational approach can provide students with real-world scenarios that connect classroom theory and knowledge to community needs. A brief literature review on service-learning within engineering education, is presented alongside brief background on the meaning of empathy. This is followed by initial qualitative findings around a service-learning trip within an undergraduate engineering course involving 13 student participants. The findings indicate service-learning in a foreign community can serve as a platform for the development of empathy in engineering undergraduates. The development of empathy can be fostered within three main findings: group dynamics, interactions with the community, and individual interpretation of the service-learning experience through self-reflection. This paper concludes with a discussion on how these three findings collectively influence the development of empathy in students. This paper provides a qualitative approach to contextualizing the development of empathy as a learning outcome for engineering educators interested in service-learning. 

This work presents the quantitative findings from a multi-method study investigating service-learning as a platform to promote empathy growth within engineering undergraduates. Qualitative results from this study have previously demonstrated the potential of service-learning activities to support the development of empathy by leveraging group dynamics, interactions with the community, and self-reflection. A repeated measures design using the Davis’ Interpersonal Relativity Index (IRI) was administered to the 14 undergraduate student participants before and after a service learning experience. Exploratory quantitative findings indicating the potential of service-learning and the use of reflection as a platform for the growth of empathy, particularly within the IRI constructs of empathic concern and perspective taking, are presented. These findings, along with associated limitations, demonstrate the importance of further investigation into the use of service learning, and other community-engaged student learning (CESL) activities as platforms for empathy development among undergraduate engineering students.