Digital Commons Network^™

Connecting The “Forgotten”: Transportation Engineering, Poverty, And Social Justice In Sun Valley, Colorado, Jen Schneider, Junko Munakata Marr

Jen Schneider

Yet [Sun Valley] has persisted. Out of neglect. Or the lack of resources and political will. It persists because Sun Valley represents in pure form the daunting legacy of social and economic segregation and the challenge of providing economic and educational opportunity to the neediest among us.

-Tina Griego, The Denver Post, 2010

The light rail stop at this location would be creating a means for companies to move into the community and the Sun Valley residents should not be forgotten when serving the area is concerned...the permanent residents of this area must not be forgotten.

-Student, Sustainable Engineering …

Making The Human Dimensions Of Sustainable Community Development Visible To Engineers, Juan Lucena, Jen Schneider, Jon A. Leydens

Jen Schneider

Recently, engineers – particularly those working on sustainability-related initiatives – have increasingly turned their efforts towards under-served communities. This paper summarises the findings in Engineering and Sustainable Community Development (Juan Lucena et al., 2010) aimed at a diversity of these efforts which are grouped here under the term ‘engineering to help’. These initiatives often exist under names such as community service, humanitarian engineering, and engineers without borders or activities such as the Institution of Civil Engineers' co-sponsored workshop ‘Helping local communities to help themselves’. Although there has been a blossoming of engineering-to-help-related programmes around the world, there is a …

Innovations In Composition Programs That Educate Engineers: Drivers, Opportunities, And Challenges, Jon A. Leydens, Jen Schneider

Jen Schneider

Recent developments in engineering education have shaped the nature of composition programs at institutions or programs that emphasize engineering and science. Among these developments are revised accreditation guidelines and a curricular debate with a long history. Such developments highlight collaborative opportunities between technical and humanities/social sciences faculty. This multi-case study investigates how composition programs have responded to such drivers, opportunities, and challenges. The study draws from historical, observation, document, and interview data, and particularly interviews with composition program administrators at six institutions with significant technical emphases. Findings indicate shifts in historical emphasis on culture and utility, and three contemporary responses. …

Engineering To Help: The Value Of Critique In Engineering Service, Jen Schneider, Juan Lucena, Jon A. Leydens

Jen Schneider

Given the fairly recent and dramatic increase in the number of "engineering to help" (ETH) programs in the developed world, we seem to be observing a theme that resonates with engineering students and faculty. Within this context, this article has two goals: first, it positions ETH programs within a history of the U.S. engineering profession generally. We argue that the emergence of ETH programs represents a shift in how some engineers and engineering educators are re-imagining and re-framing their profession and engineering education from a constraining concept of "service" to include a broader notion of "helping." Second, we want to …

Guiding Principles In Engineering Writing Assessment: Context, Collaboration, And Ownership, Jen Schneider, Jon A. Leydens, Barbara M. Olds, Ronald Miller

Jen Schneider

Several years ago, one of the authors of this chapter was privy to details of a large-scale writing assessment of junior high students. The students had been given a brief prompt asking them to think through how watching television affects people's thinking styles. One of the students involved in the assessment had approached the task creatively, beginning his essay as one would a television commercial and echoing that tone, complete with channel changes and other fragmenting interruptions. He began his essay this way: "Hi there! Television has not affected my mind ... " and then proceeded to show, in a …

Engineers, Development, And Engineering Education: From National To Sustainable Community Development, J. Lucena, J. Schneider

Jen Schneider

In October 2007, Norman Borlaug wrote in Science magazine that ‘more than 200 science journals throughout the world will simultaneously publish papers on global poverty and human development – a collaborative effort to increase awareness, interest, and research about these important issues of our time’. Borlaug, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and father of the green revolution, was demonstrating that the scientific community is at last taking questions seriously of sustainability and development. Borlaug's own contentious role in the history of ‘development,’ however, points to the complexity of the term and the contested role scientists and engineers have played in that …

Where Is ‘Community’?: Engineering Education And Sustainable Community Development, J. Schneider, J. A. Leydens, J. Lucena

Jen Schneider

Sustainable development initiatives are proliferating in the US and Europe as engineering educators seek to provide students with knowledge and skills to design technologies that are environmentally sustainable. Many such initiatives involve students from the ‘North,’ or ‘developed’ world building projects for villages or communities in the ‘South.’ Sustainable development projects in engineering education are being lauded for meeting multiple educational outcomes and providing students with important international training. This paper argues that such programmes need to educate students to think critically about their role as development professionals, to understand and value the role of community in development projects, and …