Work in Progress: Expanding the Professional Formation of Engineers through a Cross-Cultural Communication Workshop for First-Year Students

Abstract

This Work in Progress focuses on a local effort to embed cross-cultural awareness, knowledge, and skills into the professional formation of undergraduate engineering students. In particular, we will provide an overview of a cross-cultural communications workshop that was recently developed for implementation into two living-learning communities for engineering undergraduates at Virginia Tech. These living-learning communities were created to provide social and academic support for first-year female and male engineering students. Combined, these learning communities now support over 600 students, the majority of whom are enrolled in their first-year of college. This also includes a large support team of upperclassmen students (i.e., sophomores, juniors, and seniors) who serve as mentors and committee members. PurposeThe work presented here is part of a multi-year plan to impact every student involved in either of the living-learning communities. In this paper, we describe the work to date, which includes our collaboration with faculty in the field of sociology to develop the workshop and assessment results from its initial implementation. We also describe our next steps, which will include implementing a training program for upperclassmen leaders. In addition to the cross-cultural communications workshop, we will develop four more workshops on other topics related to diversity. Each workshop module will be one hour long. Our long-term goal is to have the students in the learning communities trained at a basic level to recognize why an understanding about diversity issues and developing cross-cultural skills is critical for their success.