<p>Socially engaged design programs, community development coalitions, and intentional and unintentional design spaces are rich with expertise and thinkers who are developing solutions to very pressing, yet complicated problems. Little research has been conducted on the expertise and sense-making of the community partners who participate in these situations. The goal of this research endeavor is to unpack the ways various community partners make meaning of their design experiences by answering the question: What evidence of system’s thinking can be seen in the way community partners describe their work or context? A qualitative research study was conducted in which three community partners were interviewed at various points during their engagement with socially engaged design programs. They demonstrated their systems thinking ability most strongly across the following domains: differentiate and qualify elements, explore multiple perspectives, consider issues appropriately, recognize systems, identify and characterize relationships. These findings imply that the community partners are not only capable of systems thinking but have the potential to be more deeply involved in <a>developing solutions</a> within these settings. Future studies should investigate systems thinking beyond socially engaged design in formal settings and should consider investigation protocols that more directly surface systems thinking domains. Overall, this study contributes to existing work in systems thinking by calling for a more expansive and inclusive engagement of community partners in socially engaged work.</p>

<p>Engineering engagement programs use service learning and community engagement pedagogies that require a real-world situated problem in which the community partners who experience those problems are integral to those spaces. Despite community partners being integral to engineering engagement programs, research on community partner perspectives is vastly unrepresented in literature Therefore, the goal of this work is to investigate engineering engagement programs from the perspective of the community partners by answering the research question: what meaning do community partners make of their experience in engineering engagement programs? This study describes a qualitative research inquiry in which interviews with three community partners from three different engineering engagement programs were conducted and analyzed for community partner meaning. Using a framework developed by Zittoun and Brinkmann for meaning making, this study presented several themes associated with pragmatic, semantic, and existential meanings made by community partners within this study (2012).</p><p>Findings from this study suggest implications for expansions of existing frameworks of constituents and components of engineering engagement programs, as well as potential opportunities to more deeply engaging community partners the assessment of student contributions and trajectories as a function of participation in EEPs. Additionally, findings from this study suggest an opportunity to investigate communication and thinking between students and community partners to better support the experience of the community partner (and potentially, the learning of the students). Lastly, findings from this study suggest that participation in EEPs presents the opportunity for community partners to learn by doing which can be more deeply investigated to begin addressing the gap in the literature associated with community partners in research on engineering engagement spaces.</p>