Redefining Communication Education for Engineers: How the NSF/VaNTH ERC is Experimenting with a New Approach
Year: 2020
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: IntroductionEngineering schools across the country have offered communication courses for more than 20 years, yet industry representatives continue to call for engineers who can communicate more effectively.EC 2000 lists communication as a key competency for engineers, and engineering faculty concur; yet engineering undergraduates too often see their communication requirements simply as "busywork" that they must complete in order to graduate.What accounts for these discrepancies, and what can we, as engineering educators, do to help students become more skilled communicators and better understand the role that communication plays in engineering?One reason that many students fail to recognize the importance of communication may be that communication is generally treated as a set of skills that students are supposed to acquire outside of engineering-in composition, technical writing, or public speaking courses.Students see no relation between communication and their genuine engineering work, such as solving equations, modeling processes or doing product design.Although widespread, this approach to communication pedagogy is criticized by many educators in composition, speech, and the learning sciences.In these fields, proponents of "integrated" education remind us that writing and speaking are more than a set of skills, that good communication instruction, like other effective instruction, should be firmly grounded and "contextualized" in authentic intellectual activity 1 .Responding to these ideas, engineering schools have started to experiment with innovative collaborative approaches to communication instruction, especially at the freshman and sophomore levels.As noted in a recent article in ASEE Prism, "Engineering schools across the nation are forging new connections with English, speech, and philosophy departments that allow students to study communication, teamwork, and ethics" within newly "reshaped" engineering curricula 2 . .These new freshman and sophomore programs have important Page 6.841.
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--9723
Authors: Joseph Walsh, David Kelso, John Troy, Barbara Shwom, Penny Hirsch
Institutions: Northwestern University, Northwestern University
Language: English
Subfield: Media Technology
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2602736355