Learning From Failure: Reinvention of a Service-Learning Praxis in a Community-Engaged Engineering Design Course

The COVID-19 global pandemic presented service-learning practitioners with challenges, as well as opportunities for critical analysis and reinvention. Yet there is hard work in deconstructing our practices, and risk in bravely sharing our shortcomings publicly. Learning from failure, however, has the potential to shape more critical service-learning practice. This work shares such failures and lessons learned from a critical examination of an environmental and ecological engineering service-learning course developed in 2013. Using data collected from community project assessments and a student learning assessment, as well as a gap analysis of the course based upon a critical service-learning framework, this piece highlights the tension between enhancing student learning and sustainable community impacts. To deepen this reflection and attempt to reconcile the often-competing outcomes to community-engaged, service-learning, the lead author offers their own critical self-reflective assessment of themself and their praxis. In conclusion, recommendations for shifting service-learning engineering courses toward a more critical service-learning practice will be offered using Mitchell’s (2008) critical service-learning framework.