Improving The Engineering And Writing Interface: An Assessment Of A Team Taught Integrated Course

This paper presents the results of a preliminary investigation into second-year engineering students’ attitudes towards writing. Our study assesses what effect, if any, the presence of engineering faculty as part of a teaching team has on students’ perceptions of the importance of writing to engineering and the overall quality of student writing. Sophomore Engineering Clinic I, planned and taught by faculty from the College of Communication and the College of Engineering, combines argumentative discourse, technical communication, and engineering design labs. While the course is jointly planned, it had previously been individually delivered. Worth four credits, three credits were devoted to writing and one to engineering design. As part of the present study, engineering faculty are attending 2 of the 4 writing sections. They actively join in class discussions, assist in peer critiques, ask questions, seek clarifications, and provide real life engineering examples. The remaining 2 sections are taught solely by Communication faculty. We suspect that engineering students allocate more time to their design projects, even though the writing assignments are more heavily weighted. We also suspect that students do not see connections between engineering problem solving and writing problem solving. Rather, they see writing as an ancillary tool that follows the “real” work of engineering. To test these assumptions, a survey was administered to all sections of the course. The survey asks a range of questions about the amount of time, effort, and revision the students usually apply to writing assignments. At the end of the term, the survey will be given again and results will be analyzed for significant patterns and measurable shifts. In addition to the survey, all faculty are keeping a log of classroom observations. Logs detail events and activities, as well as the students’ responses, in all sections, and will provide a qualitative context for the survey results. Our findings will be used to conceptualize the teaching and learning interactions that materialize in a teamteaching situation, to develop future directions for assessment of the value of teamteaching, and to determine whether this direct form of team-teaching should be pursued further. 1. History and Background of the Rowan Engineering and College Writing Partnership In 1992, industrialist Henry Rowan made a $100,000,000 donation to then Glassboro State College to establish a high-quality engineering school in southern New Jersey. This gift has enabled the university to create an innovative and forward-looking engineering program. The College of Engineering at what is now Rowan University is comprised of four programs: Chemical, Civil and Environmental, Electrical and Computer, and Mechanical. Each program serves 15 to 35 students per year, resulting in 60 to 140 students per year in the College. The size of the College has been optimized such that it is large enough to provide specialization in separate and credible programs, yet small enough to permit a truly multidisciplinary curriculum in which laboratory/design courses are offered simultaneously to all engineering students in all four disciplines [1]. The hallmark of the Rowan engineering program is the multidisciplinary, projectoriented Engineering Clinic sequence and its emphasis on technical communication. The Clinics are taken each semester by every student. In the Engineering Clinic, modeled after the medical school concept, students and faculty from all four engineering programs work side-by-side on laboratory experiments, real-world design projects, and research. The solutions of these problems require not only proficiency in the technical principles, but as importantly, require effective written and oral communication skills and collaborative abilities [1]. The Sophomore Engineering Clinics specifically serve the dual purpose of introducing students to formalized engineering design techniques and providing them with the necessary foundation for their careers as technical communicators. In order to achieve both of its key goals and meet university-wide general requirements, Sophomore Engineering Clinics are team-taught by faculty from the College of Engineering and the College of Communication [2]. This paper will focus on Sophomore Engineering Clinic I, which integrates the engineering clinic with a specialized version of the required second semester composition course. (Sophomore Clinic II incorporates a public speaking component.) From the inception of the program four years ago, it was agreed that the writing course would be designed to meet the needs of both colleges, Communication and Engineering, and the students’ needs as well. As a General Education requirement, the course also had to meet the demands of department and university curriculum committee guidelines. This process involved reshaping a course traditionally based entirely on research and argumentation into a technical writing course that retained a strong research and argumentation emphasis. It was also agreed that the course would be student-centered and challenging. Through the ensuing years, as the course has been tried and tested and adjusted, this emphasis has been one of its major constants. Various permutations of the combined courses have been attempted, with each year another step intended to improve integration between the two disciplines [3]. The courses have been linked since the first planning stages, but disciplinary boundaries and issues of authority and trust often impeded the full integration sought by the team. By and large, engineering and writing sections were collaboratively planned, but run separately. Team meetings provided a place to share and compare assignments that were created by individual instructors. Only one or two assignments could be considered to have been collaboratively developed. These assignments were turned in to both engineering and writing faculty, and received grades from both. Fifty percent of the students’ final grades came from the writing professors and the other half from the engineering professors. Although student transcripts recorded a single grade for a combined four-credit course, credit and grade points were computed separately for the two components and averaged at the end. Moreover, a student had to pass “both sections” of clinic to receive a passing course grade. While these activities do fit with definitions and models of interdisciplinary teaching, they did not fit with the team’s concepts of interdisciplinary teaching [4]. Thus, the means of integrating writing into the engineering curriculum has proven a challenge for us. Asking a member of the writing faculty to assist with grading engineering lab reports, or asking writing faculty to attend oral presentations at the end of the term, does not constitute integration. Furthermore, even a combined, team-taught course does not guarantee integration if lab periods focus solely on engineering projects and lecture periods focus solely on writing assignments [2]. Most importantly, comments received on student evaluations confirm that such integration has not been achieved in the minds of the students. Students see their workload as doubled because they prepare assignments for writing and engineering professors. Students, in fact, resent what they see as an artificial combination of two courses done chiefly for bookkeeping efficacy, that is, as a way to count two courses as one and thereby fit them into an already credit-intensive curriculum. The development of the course has not been seamless from a faculty perspective either. Conflicts are inevitable when two very different disciplines must negotiate a middle ground that preserves the often disparate pedagogical objectives of both [3]. Exacerbating these difficulties was that fact that the need for the course had been mandated; it was driven by “top down” (administrators) rather than “bottom up” (teachers) motives. It is important to note that most of these difficult negotiations took place in the pilot-phase of the course design and also that these discussions consumed one year’s worth of energy. However, these initial discussions lead to a more successful course. To address these problems, the engineering and writing faculty have utilized various strategies for better merging their missions and their instruction. From the start, engineering and communication faculty worked to design a curriculum that would negotiate this middle ground. Engineering faculty have had input into the design of writing assignments just as writing faculty have assisted in refining engineering assignments. The course now reflects the team’s challenging negotiations of trust, authority, and disciplinarity. For instance, engineering and writing faculty rethought the purpose of team meetings. Now these meetings are used to review what is happening in the classroom, plan assignments, and discuss broad course planning issues. Faculty make a point of alluding to these discussions in class in order to let students know that such communication and collaboration goes on. The increased integration has had positive results for the faculty too. The engineering and writing faculty have collaborated on a number of conference paper projects, as well as an NSF proposal for instructional resources. Each semester begins with a “kick-off” session where all faculty are introduced to the students and participate in class ice-breaking activities. These practices have done much to bridge disciplinary differences and create opportunities for innovative multidisciplinary teaching to develop [3]. The Fall 1999 version of Sophomore Engineering Clinic I incorporated several new initiatives that achieved some of the most dramatic evolution yet. A number of changes were implemented to move collaboration beyond the level of faculty spirit and make it more visible to students. While a syllabus incorporating writing and engineering