Service learning as a strategy for engineering education for the 21st century

Service learning is an effective strategy to enable engineering schools to attain the objectives outlined in recent reports on reforming the undergraduate engineering curriculum for the 21st Century. Service learning is a method under which students learn and develop through active participation in thoughtfully organized activities that are conducted in and meet the needs of a community. The objective of this paper is to introduce readers to the possibility of service learning as a viable pedagogic method in undergraduate engineering education. Courses from three different engineering curricula are described in this paper to illustrate how service learning can be integrated in a wide variety of courses in the engineering discipline. Service learning as a pedagogy can be used to enhance student learning while building university-community ties and addressing the many education, health and environmental needs in our community.