Board 318: Instructor Experiences Integrating Facilitated Socially Engaged Engineering Content in their Courses

While socially engaged skills and knowledge are increasingly viewed as central in contemporary engineering practice, they remain underemphasized in undergraduate engineering training. Reducing barriers and providing support for instructors interested in integrating these skills into their engineering courses is key to better preparing students to account for social and contextual factors, alongside technical factors, in their future engineering work. This paper provides an overview of the approaches leveraged by the Center for Socially Engaged Engineering and Design (C-SED) at the University of Michigan to support instructors in their efforts to integrate socially engaged content into their courses. As the C-SED continues to broaden its reach in new course contexts, we sought to understand instructor's motivations for and experiences working with C-SED, as well as their perspectives on additional opportunities to facilitate both deeper and wider-reaching integration of socially engaged content into their engineering courses. We share findings from a feedback questionnaire from instructors currently partnering with C-SED in their courses and discuss implications for our own and others' efforts to integrate more socially engaged content in engineering education.