Reimagining faculty, student and community interactions in capstone: A synthesis of liberative pedagogies, citizen engineering and human-centered design

In this work-in-progress research-to-practice paper we present a newly integrated set of lenses for creating a senior capstone design course. Our future graduates face several concurrent challenges including both the increasing complexity of technology and rapid pace of innovations, and growing expectations of what engineers design will address in terms of technical and social considerations from users, stakeholders and other communities. Moreover, there are intensifying calls to address equity and inclusiveness across fields of engineering. This work proposes to begin addressing these challenges through a new pedagogical framework that synthesizes three lenses: liberative pedagogies, citizen engineering, and human-centered design and applies this synthesis to capstone design. We specifically focus this pedagogical framework on capstone design given its centrality to preparing students for engineering practice. We review literature on capstone design and summarize each lens. We then discuss our pedagogical design approach for integrating the lenses and present an integrated framework. Our results detail our learning and teaching objectives and assessments we developed from this integrated framework. Finally, we discuss critical reflections on our approach and future challenges we see before concluding.