Bringing it down from the ivory tower: Translating Engineering-for-Community-Development (ECD) graduate student research into community engagement and undergraduate student learning.

The goal of this paper is to show how graduate engineering students working on Engineeringfor-Community-Development (ECD) projects and theses 1) acquire socio-technical education that prepares them to critically engage with community development (formation); 2) propose to translate their academic scholarship into formats and language that lead to effective engagement and appropriation by the communities they want to serve (translation); and, from this translation, 3) extend their scholarship into curricular opportunities for undergraduate engineers interested in ECD (extension). Traditional graduate engineering training often lacks education about understanding engineering as a socio-technical endeavor while graduate engineering research is often for graduate advisors to be presented in professional conferences, published in academic journals, and eventually contributing to the output of a research lab. Even when graduate engineering education is complemented with ancillary "social" topics like research ethics or professional communication, it often lacks a concerted effort to view engineering as a sociotechnical endeavor, which, as we propose, is a necessary precondition for effective community engagement. Even when the research topic could be relevant to communities or undergraduate engineering students interested in ECD projects, graduate students rarely translate their results into formats and languages understandable by different audiences. For the process of formation, we will outline how graduate students in the Humanitarian Engineering and Science (HES) Program at Colorado School of Mines (Mines) receive education and mentoring in epistemic decolonization where they learn to question the assumptions, knowledge, and methods that engineers from the Global North have used to engage communities from the Global South and the processes through which students frame their research questions, methods, and community engagement. For the process of translation, we will review the literature on "research translation" and propose models for research translation specific to the community contexts in which they are working: recyclers of electronic and construction waste, artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) communities, and houseless communities in need of clean water. For the process of extension, we will review the literature on graduateundergraduate mentoring related to engineering design projects and propose curricular opportunities for involving other engineering students in community development generated from the graduate student research and translation activities. With an increasing number of ECD-related graduate programs appearing in the horizon, there will be an increasing need for effective models for formation, research translation, and extension like those proposed in this paper. This paper hopes to contribute to these emerging needs and the future development of these crucial areas of graduate engineering education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]