Addressing Societal Challenges through Graduate-level Community-engaged Design Projects (Traditional Research Paper)

Abstract Background: Major societal problems (e.g., opioid addiction, mental health disorders, disability, incarceration, etc.) will require solutions that span individual, community, and societal systems across many different disciplines. The next generation of leaders charged with addressing these complex challenges must know how to work across traditional academic disciplinary boundaries and meaningfully engage with stakeholder individuals, communities, and policymakers. Thus, there is a strong need to train students in the necessary research and design philosophies and skills that will best prepare them to address these complex problems across a variety of users, communities, and disciplines. We have implemented a graduate-level training program that prepares trainees to address societal challenges beyond their own scientific discipline. Our goal is for students to gain a deep understanding of physical, physiological, environmental, and social-ecological factors that surround the issues, and develop technological solutions to overcome these barriers. A key feature of this training program is student participation in year-long community-engaged design projects, enabling them work in multi-disciplinary teams while being immersed within the actual communities affected by these societal problems. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of our community-engaged traineeship model to prepare trainees to address major societal challenges, to foster new convergence research opportunities, and to enhance our institutional capacity to produce STEM professionals with essential skills for innovation-related careers. Methodology: Our training is rooted in two complementary design philosophies: Design Thinking to provide students a human-centered approach to solve real world design problems, and Community-Based Participatory Research to develop intentional relationships with community partners and work together as a team in problem-solving. Teams are composed of at least four graduate students from different disciplines and local community partners invested in solving big societal challenges. Over the year, these teams work to identify the specific issues and needs within their local communities based on multiple perspectives and lived experiences, formulate research questions, and engage in participatory design to develop and test ecologically-valid multi-disciplinary solutions. Students enroll in two 3-credit courses to support them through their design project, in which they are explicitly taught how to integrate engineering, data science, and social science while meaningfully engaging with the stakeholder communities in a mutually beneficial manner. To assess the effectiveness of this training program, we used an external evaluator to assess our three research objectives using student surveys and reflections. Results: 44 graduate students over three cohorts have completed the training program, and a new cohort of 18 students began in Summer 2023. Students came from a variety of disciplines, including engineering, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, computational data science, and social work. Pre–post cohort surveys reported significant improvement in convergent research skills, community engagement, and socio-skills. Qualitative assessments described a dramatic change in how students approach their own graduate research. The community-engaged projects sought to address a variety of societal challenges, including: improving agency and resilience of individuals with opioid addiction in northern Virginia, connecting incarcerated individuals to reentry services, improving accessibility of mental health care to new patients, accessible navigation in public spaces for people with mobility impairments, and improving communication between patients with Parkinson's disease and their caregivers and clinical providers. Community partners came from a variety of non-profit organizations and community advocacy groups who are now invested in continued long-term collaboration to help address these community issues. Conclusion: We believe that this community-engaged traineeship model has strong potential to prepare graduate-level students to address societal challenges beyond their own scientific discipline.