In March 2022, Serve-Learn-Sustain (SLS) began co-leading an exciting new project, “Public Interest Technology (PIT) for First-Year Engineers,” in collaboration with the Writing and Communication Program (WCP). Under the supervision of  the project’s co-principal investigators, Andy Frazee, the WCP’s Director, and Ruthie Yow, an SLS Service Learning and Partnership Specialist, four Marion Brittain Fellows, Lee Hibbard, Mike Lehman, Renee Buesking and I, Suchismita Dutta curated interdisciplinary courses that allowed undergraduate students at Georgia Tech to collaborate with four community partners who are working towards fostering more sustainable communities in Atlanta. These courses offered our first-year engineering students a unique platform to explore themes like sustainable community engagement in Atlanta, the contested future of Atlanta’s most endangered sites, pre and post apocalyptic experiences and the politics of global hunger alongside generating difficult yet timely conversations with our community partners.

The PIT initiative brings together four community partners including Garry Harris, Founder of the Sustainability Solutions Group; Akissi Stokes, CEO of WUNDERGrubs; Donna Stephens, Founder of the Chattahoochee Brick Company Descendants Coalition; and Freddie Stevens, III, Director of Housing of the Grove Park Foundation.

Four College of Engineering Faculty members also serve as advisors to the project; they are: Matthew Realff, Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering; John Taylor, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Mary Ann Weitnauer, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering; and Chen Zhou, Associate Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

The four courses we taught this summer helped us push the boundaries of standard classroom pedagogy as we treated our students as equal stakeholders in this experimental phase of teaching a course on PIT. In retrospect, the students brought in their own unique perspective on using modern-day technology to reassess sustainable education/transportation/food security/climate crisis among other issues. As instructors, our collective achievement is marked by the affordances our syllabi created and the way in which we were able to work at the intersections of writing and communication studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and the study of global crises. Stated below are brief course descriptions that reflect the diverse aims and scope of our summer PIT classes.

Dr. Lee Hibbard's ENGL 1102 course, "The End Is Nigh, Eventually: Global and Local Approaches to the Pre-Apocalypse", focuses on current conversation surrounding disasters, calamities, and apocalyptic events, both in real life and fictional contexts, moving from the context of global perspectives on the end of the world to local efforts to mitigate apocalyptic events. Through an investigation of current events, popular culture, and local efforts towards sustainability, Hibbard’s students explored what it means to engage with notions of the apocalypse, how those notions are discussed across multiple genres, and what's being done to mitigate the seemingly inevitable destruction of all humankind. They investigated questions like: What does it mean to experience the time preceding an apocalypse? How can we look at the current events of the world through the lens of preventing the seemingly inevitable 'end of the world'? What happens when we focus on the pre apocalyptic scenario instead of the post and uncover what's being done to prevent and survive disaster? Assignments included analysis of apocalyptic media, research and creative projects that engage aspects of WOVEN communication, and active collaboration with local sustainability initiatives through the Center for Sustainable Communities in Atlanta. 

In Dr. Mike Lehman’s ENGL 1102 course, “Global Hunger,” students worked with WunderGrubs, a local community partner to consider how we can move our local concerns toward a global understanding of food and hunger. By reading an array of texts through a postcolonial framework–for our purposes defined as an invitation to imagine the world as otherwise– Lehman’s students assessed hunger as both lack and the physical need for food in addition to hunger as desire and ambition. In the face of uneven trade agreements, war, famine, and the advancement of the climate crisis, food justice and food system vitality are of ongoing concern. By creating insect-based proteins with multiple applications, from food to fertilizer, WunderGrubs seeks to advance regenerative agriculture. Additionally, the class delved into a communication toolkit to help advance the community partner’s hunger for an alternative future. Using the WOVEN approach, which considers the fusion of Written, Oral, Visual, Electronic, and Nonverbal modes of communication, Dr. Lehman propelled conversations around ideas of hunger in an age of global crises. By creating a multimodal newsletter, videos, conducting interviews, and through site visits, students engaged with alternative ways of thinking about sustainability, food, and hunger while also advancing their communication skills in alignment with WunderGrubs’ mission. 

Dr. Renee Buesking’s course, "Atlanta's Persistent Memory” explores timely questions like, how do we, as citizens of Atlanta, uncover the diverse layers of the past which structure our campus, the city, and other places that we inhabit, pass through, or imagine? Atlanta’s streets, avenues, green spaces, and buildings may look permanent but instead are in a constant state of flux. What was here before? What will be here in the future? Through a focus on the ongoing community project which seeks to restore, memorialize, and protect the site of the former Chattahoochee Brick Company, students in Dr. Buesking’s course worked in small teams to research, create, revise, and present a variety of WOVEN communication regarding the future of one of Atlanta’s most important, and most endangered, sites. Dr. Buesking, together with her students, worked at the intersection of nature and preservation, technology, forced labor, human rights, and community to imagine a different Atlanta of the future.

Dr. Suchismita Dutta’s ENGL 1102 course, “Sustainable Socio-Economic Ecologies of the Atlanta Home” is placed at the intersections of writing studies, environmental humanities, and the theory of sustainability. This course focuses on the socio-economic ecologies that support (or not) the sustainable Purpose-Built Communities Model. Organizations like the Grove Park Foundation in Atlanta aim to target issues like unequal housing and education with initiatives such as Mixed Income Housing communities, Cradle-to-College Education, and community health and wellness programs. However, issues like gentrification, environmental factors, and economic crises hinder this equitable decision making. It is also no secret that BIPOC communities in Atlanta are constantly at a risk of facing violence and displacement. Through a series of multimodal assignments, Dr. Dutta’s students critically examined some broad questions like: How can our racialized history and present guide future planning towards equitable decision-making? With the continued development of the Bellwood Quarry (neighboring Grove Park) into a tourist attraction, how will access to affordable housing be restricted to Grove Park residents? How can you propose feasible and cost-effective solutions using PIT to keep the basic resources, housing, and food accessible to vulnerable communities that will eventually be affected by gentrification?

The PIT project is funded by a GT “AMP” (Amplify Momentum Project) grant—one of seven recipients across the Institute—and it connects first-year engineers to community-based experiential learning themed around technology for the public good. In the fall, Brittain Fellows, Hibbard, Lehman, Buesking, and I will continue rethinking and teaching the SLS-affiliated English and Communication courses.