Service Learning in Engineering: A Conversation with Chris Swan
By Annie Soisson
Professor Chris Swan, Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, came to Tufts in the fall of 1994. Five years later, he became engaged with what is now the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, where he is currently an adjunct associate professor.
In 1999, Rob Hollister, now the Dean of Tisch College, offered him the support of a teaching assistant to design and deliver a course that included service learning. Swan believes that service learning is much more than simply project-based learning: He states that service learning involves four major components: an authentic project, educational objectives tied to a curriculum, connection to the community, and most importantly, a built in component of reflection.
"The course we developed involved creating knowledge on how to clean-up contaminated sites and was taken by students who were interested in this area as a career choice - mostly engineering seniors and graduate students. Once we started working with truly authentic projects, the students got intensely involved, and did more work than I actually expected!" The students kept a journal, and at the end had a post-project reflection period. Swan co-wrote a paper about the experience for the annual conference of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) in 2000, and presented a poster at the conference. "From then on, I was hooked on using service-based efforts in my courses," said Swan.
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