Teaching engineering: Displaced learners making their place

Published in

Purdue Engineering Review

5 min readFeb 10, 2021

A team from Purdue University worked with partners who had founded an unconventional school in Kenya called the Tumaini Innovation Center. Together, they co-created a localized engineering curriculum, which serves former “street children” who now learn foundational engineering skills.

Educating at scale means more than the number of people reached — it also means creating opportunities for hard-to-reach, underserved groups. We’re teaching engineering and working with learners who have been uprooted, through an innovative approach we call Localized Engineering in Displacement. Our lab focuses on the needs of local students and their fragile communities via programs that equip these students with engineering skills to improve their living conditions, further their educational goals, and build up their communities.

The number of displaced people around the world is staggering. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates there were at least 80 million forcibly displaced persons in 2020, and the United Nations Children’s Fund estimates there are from 100 million to 150 million “street youth” (UNICEF’s term for homeless/unaccompanied young people) worldwide. Astonishingly, these numbers likely are underestimates, due to underreporting caused by respondents’ security worries and constant moving.

Displaced people have the creativity and capacity to learn complex technical topics, and many are enthusiastic and eager to do so. But, they face many barriers. Language is one roadblock — because class offerings often are in colonial languages (such as English or French) and/or in the local host country’s language, rather than in the languages of the refugees’ home countries. Prior learning often is not recognized; a factor is that when refugees flee, they typically don’t bring their transcripts and certifications, and it’s too difficult or dangerous to go back and get them.

Engineering and STEM are very rarely taught to refugees, since displaced learners’ strengths and capabilities are overlooked. Most courses are brief and focus on basic skills. Low-quality and unconnected courses run rampant, as displaced learners feel an urgent need to get some kind of credential they can use, and high-quality programs are difficult to resource. In addition, obstacles posed by international or local organizations can hamper these students’ learning experience — from making it difficult to go to a class if the schedule doesn’t align with when food rations are distributed, to restrictive rules that prevent learners from applying their knowledge around the camps.

We’ve brought our localized engineering courses to a number of places worldwide, including the Azraq refugee camp in Jordan, the second-largest refugee camp in the country, hosting more than 35,000 people of concern from Syria, as well as the Kakuma refugee camp in northwestern Kenya, with almost 200,000 refugees from Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and other countries across East and Central Africa.

In Kakuma, for example, we work closely with a local, refugee-led management team (link below) to coordinate classes, build out engineering solutions on-site, and recruit our previous students to facilitate face-to-face learning. Similarly, we’ve worked with Kenyan students at the Tumaini Innovation Center, an alternative residential school for vulnerable street children. They have even been contracted by the local community clients to create solutions like a charcoal briquette press and solar-powered security alarm.

Such collaboration and cultivation of local knowledge always are vital, but they make us even more agile in COVID-19 times. For example, we’ve also collaborated with learners in the Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps in Kenya and the Adjumani refugee settlements in Uganda on a research project enabling them to study and evaluate higher education learning programs in which they participated. This research is more impactful and accurate, since they have led the study, but it’s also made it possible to conduct when travel is limited.

In the refugee camps, we’ve taught engineering classes that help displaced learners apply their knowledge to solve local problems and improve their living conditions through engineering. Examples include creating solutions like gas and fire alarms for shelters, water control systems for kitchen gardens, and small-scale wind turbines to power learning centers. At the Kenyan residential center, students learn foundational engineering competencies to overcome community challenges, and they’ve designed and installed a solar photovoltaic system that powers their classrooms and dormitory — in the process, mastering such skills as planning circuitry, purchasing materials, installation, troubleshooting, and monitoring.

Our coursework combines open-source materials, an e-learning platform, and hands-on activities. We call our pedagogical method ABCD — active, blended, collaborative, and democratic. Our team works with local and global universities to build pathways for future learning by recognizing the credits our students have accrued. Our LED program builds an engineering education ecosystem in the communities where we collaborate. We assess learners’ prior educational experiences, build on their strengths and capabilities to solve community challenges, and assist in the creation of educational and employment pathways for our learners. For example, graduates from Tumaini used their skills to get hired by a local solar energy company. In addition, I’m facilitating reciprocal exchanges of knowledge and expertise between students in my classes at Purdue and learners in our credit-bearing courses in refugee settings.

We also emphasize the valuable contributions of women and girls in engineering. While we actively highlight the importance of women in engineering, we make sure we don’t go into a community with assumptions about whether and how women participate in engineering, as they reconcile their multiple identities of leading in the workplace and leading their families. We have women leading as facilitators in our engineering classrooms, and we cooperate with our local partners to provide support, such as flexible scheduling, to back their engagement.

Our efforts are growing. Next, we plan to scale our Localized Engineering in Displacement curriculum model to Colombia, in response to the ongoing Venezuelan refugee crisis. In addition, in Zimbabwe, we are currently working with groups of girls at multiple schools, in collaboration with the girls’ rights organization Plan International. We planning with new, youth-centered organizations in Indianapolis to use “reciprocal innovation” and apply lessons from international experiences in collaboration with displaced learners here in the USA. We’re going to build out our participatory research with the refugee learners, including engaging them in co-authorship of our group publications. We’re also striving to expand an entrepreneurial venture our students led.

One of the biggest challenges is accomplishing the conceptual change that needs to happen: recognizing the assets that marginalized learners have, both individually and in their communities. External expertise often is seen as a necessary savior for displaced peoples. We’re demonstrating that learners can take initiative to lead and achieve their goals, while using their newfound engineering expertise to construct a cohesive local ecosystem for both displaced persons and the host community.