ABSTRACT
The Responsible Mining, Resilient Communities project is a multi-country, interinstitutional, and interdisciplinary global research collaboration whose goal is to co-design socially responsible and sustainable gold mining practices with communities, engineers, and social scientists. A key component of this work is engineering education research that investigates how situated learning enhances undergraduate students' global sociotechnical competency, especially as it relates to their ability to define and solve problems with people from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and life experiences. Situated learning refers to how students learn under different a) configurations of social relations (e.g., graduate/undergraduate;expert/non-expert;US/non-US students, etc.);b) pedagogical strategies for engineering problem definition and solution (e.g., remote vs. in-person;in-class vs. in-field);and c) different geographical contexts (e.g., in the US vs. in Colombia) affect faculty and student learning. Global sociotechnical competency refers to having the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to define and solve engineering problems as socio-technical in different international settings. Knowledge is understanding how engineering problems are always socio-technical and shaped by the historical, cultural, economic, and physical dimensions of a place. Skills are learning to define and solve problems with perspectives different than their own. Attitudes are the desires to continue engaging other expert and non-expert perspectives, working abroad, and serving communities after graduation. In 2019 a diverse group of engineering undergraduate students from the Colorado School of Mines, United States Air Force Academy, and Universidad Nacional de Colombia - Medellín participated in a two-week field session in Colombia, where they visited mine sites and processing facilities, in addition to the partner university in Colombia. In 2020, however, the burgeoning COVID-19 pandemic made international fieldwork impossible. This paper will describe how we developed and executed a meaningful distance-based fieldwork experience that maintained direct engagement with international students and community members. We will offer a preliminary assessment of these methods' efficacy for developing global sociotechnical competency through remote community engagement and learning. We will analyze the situated learning of the student participants as they differently identified stakeholders for engineering projects and changed their understanding of mining as a sociotechnical process as a result of the summer session. As a part of this analysis, we will also compare 2019 (in the field) and the 2020 (virtual) learning outcomes for the two different sets of students. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021