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Engagement in Practice: A model for community partnership in an infrastructure capstone course

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Conference

2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Minneapolis, MN

Publication Date

August 23, 2022

Start Date

June 26, 2022

End Date

June 29, 2022

Conference Session

Community Engagement Division Technical Session 2 - Community Engagement without Frontiers

Page Count

8

DOI

10.18260/1-2--41323

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/41323

Download Count

186

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Paper Authors

biography

George Hunt University of Nebraska - Lincoln

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Dr. George Hunt is an environmental and water resources engineer and Assistant Professor of Practice at the University of Nebraska.

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biography

Matthew Williamson University of Nebraska - Lincoln

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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.

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Abstract

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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