Pilot study on the integration of service learning in higher education within the field of chemical engineering

Resumen

Service learning is a teaching learning methodology that integrates community service with academic learning to create a mutually beneficial experience for both students and the community. It goes beyond traditional classroom instruction by actively engaging students in real-world activities that address community needs (Hume and Mondal, 2023).As a relatively new pedagogy, service learning has gained prominence higher education of many countries since its emergence in the early 2000s, and it is increasingly used (Opazo et al., 2016). The application of service learning in higher education offers numerous benefits for students, communities, and educational institutions. Among these benefits are experiential learning of students, civic engagement and social responsibility, personal growth, community impact, professional development, increased motivation and engagement, community partnerships, global awareness, positive institutional image.Today’s engineers are expected to work on multidisciplinary teams in a multicultural environment, manage multiple projects, and compete in a highly diverse global marketplace (Oakes, 2004). Service-learning offers many opportunities to fulfill these new requirements. While the adoption of service-learning within engineering has lagged behind that of other disciplines, significant numbers of universities across the world are using this pedagogy for engineering education (Oakes, 2004).A group of professors from the Chemical Engineering department of Universidad de La Laguna has undertaken a teaching innovation project involving the integration of the service learning methodology in several courses within the Bachelor degrees of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Civil Engineering. In these courses, service learning has been incorporated on an experimental pilot basis, aiming to identify the advantages and weaknesses of this methodology in engineering-related courses. In the majority of courses participating in the project, the activities performed are related to the environmental protection.In each course, students have engaged in two service learning activities, working in groups in a collaborative way. Following the completion of these activities, an assessment is conducted to evaluate the knowledge acquired by the students. Additionally, the degree of satisfaction and the opinions of the students regarding this new leaning methodology are analyzed through a survey. The obtained results are positive, as the majority of students express satisfaction with the developed teaching methodology.