Empowering Displaced Students through a Local Community-centered Engineering Education Framework

There are many opportunities to use engineering skills to improve living conditions in displacement. However, displaced populations are often overlooked as potential engineers for their community. In a time where the global policy arena is discussing strategies to foster self-reliance by helping them to become part of the solution, the desire to develop solutions to displaced communities is more important than ever. On the one hand, there are many ways to use engineering education to promote self-reliance. On the other hand, there is a lack of policies and conditions to enable educators to design engineering education programs effectively in these settings. In light of these constraints, existing engineering solutions often come through international programs or external aid. This paper intends to examine a pedagogical framework, called localized engineering in displacement (LED), designed to provide displaced students with an opportunity to attend and earn credit for an undergraduate introductory engineering course within their community and foster local capacity building.