Minneapolis, MN
August 23, 2022
June 26, 2022
June 29, 2022
Community Engagement Division Technical Session 2 - Community Engagement without Frontiers
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10.18260/1-2--41323
https://peer.asee.org/41323
233
Dr. George Hunt is an environmental and water resources engineer and Assistant Professor of Practice at the University of Nebraska.
Dr. Matt Williamson is an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). Dr. Williamson's teaching interests include team-based learning, student inclusion and retention, and engaged project-based learning.
Prior to joining the faculty of UNL, he served as Senior Geotechnical Engineer and Geotechnical Department Manager at private engineering firms.
Dr. Williamson was an instructor of Construction Engineering Technology at Kansas State University (KSU) for nine years. Prior to his time at KSU, Williamson was an Engineering Associate for the Kansas Department of Transportation.
In the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 semesters, capstone design faculty in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln engaged in a partnership with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln extension, industry and community organizations including the Chamber of Commerce from the city of Columbus, Nebraska. The partnership between the university and the municipality provided students an opportunity to create comprehensive and creative design solutions to real engineering challenges identified by community stakeholders. The community projects were identified prior to the beginning of the Fall 2020 semester by the city chamber of commerce as well as local industry partners. At the initiation of the partnership, the city entities realized the benefit of receiving creative potential solutions to meet real community needs. Benefits to the students of this community-engaged capstone partnership included gaining real world experience communicating with the public and clients to understand their needs, learning to ask questions to discover underlining reasons for specific requests; working with professional engineers to find existing data, and learning to accept feedback from the public, clients, and professional engineers about their work. Student and public stakeholder responses indicate that both groups recognized benefits from the engagement aspect of the project.
Hunt, G., & Williamson, M. (2022, August), Engagement in Practice: A model for community partnership in an infrastructure capstone course Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41323
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