While engineering service-learning projects are seen as a favorable way for students to reinforce curricular learning while gaining cultural awareness, the outcomes of these projects center student benefits over partner community wellbeing. For these projects, and in other engineering contexts, various scholar-activists have conceptualized numerous principles and methods to center justice and equity in engineering outcomes. This research project and its associated intervention involved collecting scholarship and methods in engineering and social justice, and attempted to integrate these ideas into the practices of a local humanitarian service-learning engineering team. The collected scholarship centered around the topics of Design Justice, feminist qualitative science & technology studies, and Latin American decolonial theory. In partnership with the Engineers Without Borders Cal Poly Local projects team, following the frameworks of critical participatory action research and community autoethnography, the author spent time with the team to build relationships and facilitated presentations, dialogues, and activities around the collected scholarship. Two sets of semi-structured interviews were conducted before and after the intervention, and qualitative data was analyzed using iterative thematic inquiry. This project found that a local humanitarian engineering-service learning environment was a suitable space to advocate alternative design principles and methods, and that students expressed a desire to learn more about these topics, as well as utilize and share these resources with their friends and in other contexts such as their professional careers. Students experienced moderate amounts of success in using the collected scholarship to modify their project practices, specifically their plans for community assessment. These results imply that other spaces and organizations with an explicit focus on service or social justice may be ideal environments to attempt to implement alternative design principles, and that more efforts to enable students to learn about and share alternative principles could have lasting effects.

Providing students with service opportunities as an instructional tool has recently gained the attention of educators and legislative policy-makers. Participation in service activity has been positively correlated with attitudinal outcomes and the development of a responsible citizenry. While many philosophical and political proposals have been offered for why service-learning initiatives are important to higher education, this study attempted to gain insight into how service-learning impacts college students, specifically, students' cognitive development. The cognitive development of students participating in four service-learning sociology courses at a large, southeastern research university was measured using Erwin's (198J.) Scale of Intellectual Development- IV (SID). The SID-IV measures cognitive growth using Perry's (1968) scheme of cognitive development. The research design was a 2 (servicel non-service) X 2 (pre-testlpost-test) fa~torial design. In addition, analyses were conducted using course type, course instructor, and participant academic level to further elucidate group differences in cognitive growth. As a measure of the salience of the SL experience to the learning of course material, participants were asked to write a short answer to the question, "What activities in this class helped you learn the course materials best?" Responses 'were analyzed by SLINSL, length of response, and rank order of activities mentioned. The null hypothesis that there are no differences in the degree of Perry level thinking among service-learning participants (SL) and non-service-leaming (NSL) participants on pre- and post-test measures was supported empirically. Significant differences among participants were found by course type, instructor, and academic classification. Results of the short answer question provided anecdotal evidence that students perceived service as a meaningful method of learning in the class. / Master of Arts

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All meaningful communication is a form of storytelling, according to Walter Fisher, who introduced the narrative paradigm to communication theory, and storytelling is universal across cultures and time as the manner in which people comprehend life. Storytelling is also a creative form of art. This interdisciplinary, multimedia work will explore the creative use of non-traditional storytelling to gather information about how creativity evolves in people with Alzheimer's and dementia and why this is important to both academia and the community. Currently, there is a lot of research available about the debilitating affects of memory loss, but there is very little research available about retained abilities. Perhaps, just as the blind significantly outperform the sighted in tactile experiments, there are some forms of creativity in storytelling in which people with Alzheimer's and dementia may demonstrate more ability than their fully cognizant peers. My goal is to contribute to a small but growing effort to explore "memory loss as (...) more than just memory loss" (Dr. Anne Bastings).

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