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A Community-Engagement-Based Design Project

in Introductory Environmental Engineering

Mary P. Cardenas

Harvey Mudd College

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A collaborative, community-based design project was implemented in the upper-division

undergraduate technical elective Introduction to Environmental Engineering at Harvey Mudd

College. Students worked with multiple stakeholders in order to design a debris flow barrier for a

wilderness land parcel acquired by a local conservancy group. The Rosemont Preserve is a

The conservancy board of directors served as liaisons for the design project, provided

background material and the project statement to the student team, as well as answered questions

and provided guidance during the design process. Local residents (serving as volunteers for the

Conservancy) also served as resources for student questions. LA County Public Works oversees

the placement, maintenance, and removal of K-Rails. The student team characterized the

wilderness site; acquired relevant GIS data; studied the physics of debris flow and examined

previous debris flow barrier designs. The team produced alternative designs for the barrier and

chose the best design by applying design metrics. The alternative designs and rationale for the

chosen design were presented to the board of directors of the Conservancy.

experience for undergraduate students, and one that is representative of how natural resources are

currently being managed.

This paper summarizes previous community-engagement learning, particularly in the context of

undergraduate engineering education; argues that co-managed ecological resources provide good

opportunities for increased student engagement with communities; describes an undergraduate

engineering design project involving a co-managed resource; and presents assessment data on the

educational effectiveness of the design process while working with a co-managed resource.

In conclusion, the co-managed project provided richer and increased communication between the

One characteristic of community-centered instruction is that the students learn from others, often

in a group setting, where students are encouraged to be active participants. The definition of

outside community. There are many reasons to engage in community-centered instruction: to

expose students to real-world ethics and government policy; to practice communication with

people outside their own academic and social community; to promote student reflection on how

their work affects their community and how community affects their work; to provide a benefit

to the community (a design of a useful device, information gathering and analysis); to engender a

sense of professional responsibility; to provide a cultural context for their work, and additional

for-profit organizations. The “community” is often a sole liaison from the not-for-profit

organization, and the students (often in teams) generally have two major times they communicate

with this “community”—during the initial definition of the project and at the end of the project,

when presenting the final design or product. There are projects where the final deliverable is a

written report, not involving any further face-to-face communication or feedback with the

community sponsor. For many of these projects, there is only one person representing the

community, or if there are multiple liaisons, they are often of the same ‘type’—perhaps co-

workers at the non-profit organization, who generally have the same objectives and focus

regarding the direction of the project.

the first year through the senior level. Past project sponsors include local elementary schools,

Habitat for Humanity, museums, and natural resources and conservation organizations. A

number of institutions of higher education have engaged in K-12 outreach work

. Typically,

students work with K-12 partners in order to produce curricular materials intended to introduce

young students to engineering and to promote interest in engineering and science. Padmanabhan

and Katti

described an example of a capstone project in civil engineering at North Dakota State

involving community engagement. In this project, students worked with a local homeowners

association to mitigate slope instabilities.

are a good learning experience, and very valuable to these types of projects, but I believe that

many projects could be improved with more-integrated, continuous threads of communication

between the students and the community actors.

Collaboratively managed, or co-management projects

, involve multiple stakeholders working

together. Co-management is usually described in the context of ecological resources, where

community members and state agencies share in decision-making processes; in particular, co-

management focuses on the collaborative learning and power-sharing that participating social

actors engage in while making decisions

. Tensions, clashing, and conflicts can exist between

various social actors in co-management scenarios; however, the recognition and valuing of

potentially different objectives and concerns is paramount in co-management.

receiver of knowledge from a sole client with one opinion or set of knowledge--and lead to an

throughout the entire project.

E138, Introduction to Environmental Engineering, has been offered as an upper-division

technical elective at Harvey Mudd College (HMC) since 1996. HMC offers a degree in General

Engineering, and students often gain more discipline-specific learning through careful choice of

their technical electives and capstone clinic projects. E138 has typically been taught in a lecture-

based, problem-solving format. The primary purpose of the course is to introduce students to the

the environment. Societal factors are discussed, particularly when introducing toxic chemicals

and risk assessment/analysis. The social, economic, and political factors driving contamination

and clean-up are addressed using real-world examples.

For the course offering in Fall 2012, nine students enrolled in E138. Eight of the students were

engineering majors; the ninth student was an Environmental Analysis major. Seven of the

students were female. Two students were seniors; six were juniors, and the remaining student

was a sophomore.

ownership of, that involve first-hand experience wrestling issues, thus lessening the not-my-

problem disengagement, inattentiveness, and indifference that can crop up during lecture-only

learning. My objectives were to find a small design project for a local environmental

conservation group; ideally with multiple, not-necessarily-technical liaisons; and most

importantly, involving a co-management scenario. Collaborative or co-management is a term

from environmental management literature

resources by multi-stakeholders—often a government agency in conjunction with local residents

and/or community groups. Fisheries and forests are often described as co-managed resources.

Carlsson and Berkes

the participation of different actors that typically try to find ways to learn from their actions and

adapt the behavior to the consequences of their own, and others’, actions, otherwise they cannot

form any collaborative arrangement.” Interestingly, they further state that the ecological area or

within which communities and other groups can develop the knowledge and skills to solve their

own problems.” For the E138 design project, a co-managed ecological area would allow the

the community groups and government agencies in order to develop alternative solutions to a

problem. This type of project would stretch the students’ intellectual muscles, helping them

juggle potentially differing objectives, constraints, and weightings when working with the

various co-management actors.

We chose a design project to investigate alternative debris flow barriers for a local conservancy

group. The Arroyos & Foothills Conservancy (AFC) is an Altadena, California community-

The Rosemont Preserve is at the mouth of Goss Canyon. Goss Canyon is a 300-acre wilderness

area mostly maintained as wilderness by private landowners. Directly south and west of

Rosemont Preserve are residential areas of La Crescenta (Figure 1.) In 2009, the Station Fire

burned 650 km

threat of mudslides from the fire-denuded hillsides, LA County Public Works (hereafter referred

barrier (Figure 2) to protect residential areas from the possibility of additional debris flow. Three

years after the Station Fire, many of the K-rails have been removed, but a 48-meter-long line of

to the E138 students, approximately mid-way through the semester. One board member is an

engineer, and the second is a flute repairman, and both are deeply engaged in the preservation

and stewardship of the Rosemont Preserve. The students and the board members participated in a

question-and-answer session after the project statement and background were presented. The

majority of the students in E138 had taken the first-year engineering studio design course

,

which runs the students through the design process. To build on this knowledge, major project

deadlines were thus based on typical design-process goals: 1) a revised project statement, and

objectives and constraints were due one week after AFC visited our classroom; 2) functions,

means, and alternative design concepts were due 2 weeks later; 3) design metrics and an

evaluation of the alternatives designs were due 2 weeks before the final presentation; and 4) a

draft presentation including final design selection was due the week before the final presentation.

Figure 3. Line of K-Rails installed in Rosemont Preserve. Photo courtesy of Tim Wendler and

Paul Rabinov.

The students divided themselves into three sub-teams: Geographical Information Systems (GIS)

analysis and mapping; Floodplain research and solutions; and K-Rail design. The GIS sub-team

of three students produced maps of the area, which helped to analyze the magnitude of the design

some answers to their questions about K-Rail design specifications, but soon all response from

the County ceased. It is not clear whether this was due to the type of questions the E138 students

asked, or because the County employees were not able to prioritize the K-Rail removal project. I

had no contact with the County prior to the initiation of the project, and although AFC had

discussed K-Rail replacement with the County, they were not told that a student group would be

working on design alternatives. However, this caused the E138 students to come up with other

ways of verifying the County’s numbers, defining design specifications, and justifying their

happened had the County simply provided information. Thus, although the reticence of the

County was not optimal, it was a good learning experience of real-world (lack of)

bit perplexed with how the AFC responded; often, the students would write one board member,

One AFC member even visited campus after receiving a forwarded email message from the E138

students, and spent an hour answering questions; before this person visited, the students did not

know this person existed as an AFC member. Interestingly, AFC only provided the students with

a list of County contacts, and neglected to give the students a list of AFC members. It is likely

that AFC members, being a closely-knit community, forwarded the students’ email messages

widely, and this may have contributed to the number of different AFC actors who became

involved in the project. The varied social actors from AFC, and their different backgrounds,

contributed to the desired community-engagement nature of the project. I was also pleased that

the communication continued throughout the project; this was not the typical project in that the

majority of the discussion occurred during the project definition stage—the students and many of

quantitatively define a metric for that objective. At the suggestion of AFC, the students

investigated architecture and landscape architecture literature in order to gain direction on how to

write such a metric. The students’ first attempts were fairly weak, using phrases such as ‘more

quantitative metrics, including non-linearity of color, geometric profile, geometry of faces; visual

consistency; opportunity for human interaction with the design; and consistency with the

environment in color, texture, locality of source material, spatial dimensions consistent with