Innovations in Composition Programs that Educate Engineers: Drivers, Opportunities, and Challenges

Abstract

Recent developments in engineering education have shaped the nature of composition programs at institutions or programs that emphasize engineering and science. Among these developments are revised accreditation guidelines and a curricular debate with a long history. Such developments highlight collaborative opportunities between technical and humanities/social sciences faculty. This multi-case study investigates how composition programs have responded to such drivers, opportunities, and challenges. The study draws from historical, observation, document, and interview data, and particularly interviews with composition program administrators at six institutions with significant technical emphases. Findings indicate shifts in historical emphasis on culture and utility, and three contemporary responses. Reductions, transformations, and innovations are occurring in first-year communication courses. Also, multimodal communications, including written, oral, and visual components, are being integrated across multiple instructional contexts. Finally, strong crosscurricular communication programs are emerging in which composition faculty partner with technical faculty. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Écrits universitaires / écrits professionnalisants / écrits professionnels : est-ce qu’« écrire pour apprendre » est plus qu’un slogan ?

“…L'approche pragmatique des chercheurs aux Etats-Unis n'exclut pas des projets de recherche approfondie dans la salle de classe dans des disciplines données afin d'éclairer le sens des dispositifs. Ainsi, Paul Anderson et ses collègues en science informatique (Carter et al, 2011), Labwrite en chimie, EngiComm en ingénierie (Leydens & Schneider, 2009) organisent la recherche dans des disciplines spécifiques, en collaboration avec des experts dans ces mê-mes disciplines.…”

Communication in the Engineering Curriculum: Learning to Write and Writing to Learn

“…"Disciplinary writing and communication instruction is integrated into technical courses, whose technical instructors have participated in CxC seminars and have ongoing access to CxC resources." (Leydens and Schneider, 2009) 2. "Collaborative teaching involving composition and technical faculty in technical courses, wherein the composition faculty member has input into course communication goals and opportunities for direct communication instruction."…”

“…(Leydens and Schneider, 2009) This encouraged curricular structures in which English or Composition courses were used as primary vehicles for teaching students to write.…”

“…The criteria list "an ability tocommunicate effectively" as one of 11 student outcomes required for all engineering programs (ABET, 2015), but the criteria are concerned with evidence that this outcome has been achieved, and do not prescribe how it is to be achieved. Leydens and Schneider (2009), in reviewing how writing was being and had been addressed in engineering programs on six campuses, noted that the shift to outcomes-based accreditation had been a facilitator for change and innovation on several of these campuses. Communication became viewed as an interdisciplinary subject, and five of the six campuses, at the time of publication, had implemented, or were in the process of implementing, Communication across the Curriculum (CxC) in some form.…”

Contradicciones acerca de cómo promover la escritura epistémica en las disciplinas: lo que hemos aprendido en EEUU

“…Interventions at the level of disciplinary organizations occurred most notably in Engineering, whose national accrediting agency, ABET, made communication one of its six major criteria for certifying university departments of engineering as compliant with standards. This spawned collaboration and research over the last decade under the rubric of EngiComm (Leydens, & Schneider 2009). More recently, a discipline-level multiuniversity intervention and research project in Computer Science, funded by the National Science Foundation, attempts to construct and test a four-year framework for developing students' communication-primarily written-in that field (Carter, Vouk, Gannod, Burge, Anderson & Hoffman 2011).…”