Bringing it down from the ivory tower: translating Engineering-for-Community-Development (ECD) graduate education and research into community engagement and undergraduate student learning

Traditional graduate engineering training often lacks frameworks to view engineering as a socio-technical endeavour in the service of vulnerable populations, while graduate engineering research is often done to advance the careers of graduate advisors, presented in professional conferences, published in academic journals, and evaluated according to its contributions to the output of research labs. This paper shows how graduate students working on Engineering-for-Community-Development (ECD) research projects (1) acquire socio-technical education that critically connects their personal histories with ECD (formation); (2) translate their scholarship into formats and language for effective and responsible engagement with the communities they want to serve (translation); and (3) extend their scholarship into opportunities for undergraduate engineers interested in ECD (extension). With the growth of ECD-related graduate programs, there is an increasing need for effective models for formation, research translation, and extension, like those proposed in this paper.