Engineering Students’ Empathy Development Through Service Learning: Qualitative Results in a Technical Communication Course

Abstract

Given the need for engineers to situate their designs within real-life constraints, engagement with the public is necessary to understand and serve all stakeholders who may be affected. Empathy is an area of growing interest in engineering education and could be considered the first step towards engagement with the public to understand their needs. To work towards engaging engineering students in public welfare, humanities-focused courses like technical communication are an excellent place to begin these conversations. One pedagogical strategy for engaging students with real-world problems that affect the community is service learning. The service-learning project for this study required students to serve a not-for-profit client by adapting an instruction set for a target audience that the client was trying to reach. After the project with the client was complete, students reflected upon the experience in writing, which are the focus of this paper. This paper follows up a previous paper and builds upon the aggregated quantitative results presented there by presenting the results of the overall qualitative analysis to help understand those trends. This paper addresses the qualitative results of students’ written reflections to see what impact the project has on students’ empathy and engagement with public welfare.