Opening the Black Box: Exploring Clients’ Student-Engagement Practices in Student Consulting Projects

Clients play a critical role in student consulting projects, but how they approach these roles is largely unknown. Since client meetings typically occur outside of class and empirical research on client views is limited, the engagement practices that clients employ in their interactions with students represent a “black box” that needs to be unlocked. This article opens the lid of this metaphorical black box, presenting findings from qualitative research on the engagement practices that project clients say they employ in their interactions with student teams. We find three key variations in client engagement practices: variations in how clients frame a project’s purpose , how they orient to project procedures , and how they support—or subvert—the pedagogy of the instructor and course. We introduce this Purpose-Procedure-Pedagogy engagement variation framework, present data extracts to illustrate each variation type, and discuss potential impacts and recommendations for instructors, administrators, and researchers.