This seminar contributes to a recent movement in engineering education, calling attention to fostering more engineering students to develop social awareness to solve complex problems in the real world. As many engineering problems raised in a community can be related to addressing social issues, community-based learning (CBL) has become a way to educate more empathic engineers. However, there is an ethical consideration in CBL as the outcome of student learning can impact a real-world community partner. Therefore, it is critical to understand how students engage with empathy in CBL to commit to the community’s needs authentically before implementation.

In this seminar, I will share some qualitative findings from my dissertation study focusing on how students shift between the roles of “self” and “others” in the process of engaging with empathy in CBL. I also investigated different types of opportunities to expose students to empathy in CBL, such as structural opportunities (how the CBL activity is organized), social opportunities (how students are guided to work with others), and reflective opportunities (how students think about what they have learned). The seminar concludes with practical recommendations for engineering educators to understand how to support students to engage with empathy in community-based learning contexts.