Addressing Multiple Goals for Engineering Writing: The Role of Course-Specific Websites

Writing instruction for engineering students involves differing perspectives and in some cases conflicting goals of many stakeholders including future employers, accrediting associations, writing center staff, and faculty in engineering, English, composition, and technical writing programs. These perspectives and conflicts can be addressed through a bottomup approach to WAC and WID: coursespecific websites, in which instructional materials that focus on writing tasks for a particular engineering course are both conceptually and electronically linked to other perspectives. By addressing specific tasks from multiple perspectives, course-oriented websites may help to build the consensus among disparate stakeholders necessary for more extensive efforts. Glenn J. Broadhead Oklahoma State University, Stillwater/Tulsa 20 Language and Learning Across the Disciplines we first need to review the goals of the interested parties in greater detail, for their differences comprise a messy tangle of educational theories, disciplinary cultures, curricular goals, institutional lines of authority and allegiance, and funding policies and practices. We may then turn to a description of the course-specific website, and finally to a discussion of the website’s potential role in addressing the concerns of the various groups interested in the instruction of engineering students. Groups with Potentially Conflicting Interests about Engineering Writing At least four academic or professional groups have overlapping and potentially conflicting interests in college writing instruction for engineering students: (1) prospective employers and professional/academic accrediting organizations, (2) engineering faculty, (3) English Department faculty, including composition instructors and writing-center staff, and (4) technical writing faculty. 1. Employers and Accrediting Agencies Employers have long complained about poor communication skills among engineers. At the entry level, the complaints may involve a rookie employee’s lack of familiarity with the company’s institutional culture (Lutz, 1989; LaRoche and Pearson, 1985). Or they may point to an inability to address nonspecialist readers effectively (Braham 1992); as Bernard McKenna (1997) notes, “the engineering report. . .crosses a discourse boundary to (presumably) non-engineering clients (such as construction and fabrication managers and government authorities)” (193). At a more senior level, engineers may have difficulty with administrative and client-centered tasks and genres (Tadmor et al. 1987; Graham 1998). In many cases, however, complaints focus on a lack of general communication skills—a failing that seems inappropriate for a college graduate (Spears 1986; Gates 1989). Targets of concern range from sentence structure and usage (Bly 1998; Lanciani 1998; Goldwasser 1998) to cohesion and organization (Rhinehart 1991). The employer’s point of view is shared by the main accrediting agency for engineering programs: the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). By emphasizing outcomes in assessing programs, ABET promotes the workplace skills required of professional engineers, including their need to communicate well in writing and speech. Both in its current guidelines (ABET 1997a) and in its goals for the next century (ABET 1997b), the accrediting organization expects programs to produce engineers who can communicate well with fellow workers, supervisors, and clients. In doing so, ABET appears to respond to “a significant change in the way many of the most successful firms manage their 21 Addressing Multiple Goals for Engineering Writing human resources and organize their work,” moving from a “skills components model” with “limited and passive roles of workers in traditional hierarchical organizations” to a “professional model” in which “technical and foundation skills are the. . .enablers for more complex general functions such as problem solving, reasoning, and the exercise of judgment” (Bailey and Merritt 1997, pp. 405-11). ABET’s focus on workplace skills is nowhere more evident than in its sample case study of “Coastal State College” (ABET 1998), which models how an institution might document improvement in an outcomes-oriented assessment program: “. . .after instituting a requirement of a technical writing course for all engineering programs, employer complaints about the writing performance of graduates decreased” (p. 13). Indeed, ABET includes “the ability to communicate effectively” among its eleven principal criteria of evaluation; and for advanced level programs, ABET specifies that students must complete “an engineering project or research activity resulting in a report that demonstrates both mastery of the subject matter and a high level of communication skills” (ABET 1997b)—a goal earlier voiced by Michael Rabins (1986) in his call for a pedagogy leading to “productive communication among the members of a design team” (25). In the older language of the 1998-99 criteria, too, a composition requirement or even a technical writing course is not sufficient: “Although specific course work requirements serve as a foundation for such competence, the development and enhancement of writing skills must be demonstrated through student work in engineering work and other courses.” Similar concerns for competency in communication skills are voiced (though certainly not stressed) in the National Research Council’s Engineering Undergraduate Education (1986, pp. 10, 81) and its more recent Engineering Education: Designing an Adaptive System (1995, p.8). By focusing on assessment through a design project requiring a written report, and by insisting that communication skills must be exhibited in work within engineering courses, the ABET criteria appear to encourage the writing to learn goals of WAC (Held et al. 1994; Hendriks and Pappas 1995; Sharp 1995), reflecting similar efforts in computer science (Walker 1998) and accounting (O’Connor and Ruchala 1998). Though the notion of writing to learn as a universally desirable pedagogy has been challenged (Smagorinsky 1995), skill in writing is clearly relevant to a student’s preparation for the workplace activities of an engineer, which in most cases involve the production of discourse. For example, “writing” is listed or implied as a professional task in nearly every job description for engineers in the U.S. Department of Labor’s Dictionary of Job Titles (1991), as one would expect from studies of the workplace writing of engineers (Allen 1987; Selzer 1983; Paradis, Dobrin, and Miller 1985; Broadhead and Freed 1986; Winsor 1990, 1998). Of course, the ABET guidelines do not 22 Language and Learning Across the Disciplines always result in an engineering curriculum that is thoroughly imbued with written and oral tasks to facilitate the development of disciplinary knowledge—a goal outlined by Mathes, Stevenson, and Klaver (1979), and partly implemented in the Professional Liaison Program (Wilson 1995) and in other efforts (Pauschke and Ingraffea 1996). More often than not, engineering departments require a capstone, senior-year design course that calls for a fairly lengthy written report (e.g., Yannitell and Cundy 1988). While such a course illustrates a programmatic concern with writing, it does not necessarily ensure that significant writing instruction will occur. 2. Engineering Faculty The concerns of employers and accrediting agencies are often shared by engineering faculty, since as teachers they care about the career potential of their graduates. On the other hand, they may sometimes be more worried about a student’s ability to perform writing tasks in their courses. For many engineering faculty members, a workplace-oriented writing course in the senior year may be much less desirable than a lowerdivision course that focuses on writing tasks appropriate to specific upper-division engineering classes, with enrollment limited to students in that field. However, the stringent course-hour demands of engineering curricula (which engineering faculty design in response to ABET criteria) make it very difficult for students to take two semesters of first-year composition, a field-specific writing course in the sophomore year, and a workplace-oriented course in the senior year. Indeed, the general tendency among engineering faculty is to encourage fewer rather than more credit hours in courses devoted solely to writing instruction. For example, at Oklahoma State University, engineering students who earn a B or an A in a first-semester composition course can skip the second-semester composition course, replacing it with an upper-division service course in technical writing. Since that upper-division course is often not taken until the student’s final semester in college, many students have only one firstsemester composition course to prepare for college-level writing in engineering. For some students who enter college as good writers, this may not be a problem; but for many other students, it is. Despite this paucity of requirements for writing instruction, engineering faculty still want to see students who can (a) write like specialists in a particular field of engineering or (b) at least write clearly and succinctly, with a minimum of “grammar” or usage errors. A complicating factor is that many American academics (including many engineering faculty) hold relatively unsophisticated notions about rhetoric, language, and writing. This at least is the testimony of dozens of frustrated, alarmed, or ticked-off essays in professional journals 23 Addressing Multiple Goals for Engineering Writing (e.g., Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering, IRE Transactions on Engineering Writing & Speech, STWP Review) and trade magazines (e.g., Quality) for the last fifty years (Broadhead 1983, 1985). In article after article, “technical writing” is reduced to sterile notions of traditional grammar, to appeals to the authority of conservative warhorses such as Strunk & White, to promotion of quick-trick readability formulas, or to inculcation of reductionist and wildly misleading precepts like KISS—i.e., “Keep It Simple, Stupid” (e.g., Crawford 1945; Miller 1948; Shurter 1952; J. Baker 1955; Feistman 1959; Fielden 1959; Racker 1959; Weisman 1959; Clauser 1961; Keith 1967; Schindler 1975; Heldt 1976; Bush 1980; Mitchell 1980; Mueller 1980; Vervalin 1980; Marder and Guinn 1982). As David Russell has noted (1992; see also Russell 1991), American faculty (including engineers) are often committed more to “upholding disciplinary standards” than to addressing the writing needs of less well-prepared students. Indeed, because the American education system is founded on the principle of “disciplinary specialization,” there has generally been no “integral role” for writing: Instead of viewing writing as a complex and continuously developing response to a specialized, text-based, discourse community, highly embedded in the differentiated practices of that community, educators. . .see it as a set of generalizable, mechanical ‘skills’ independent of disciplinary knowledge, learned once and for all at an early age. . . .Thus, writing instruction past the elementary school [has been] viewed as mere remediation of deficiencies in skill rather than as a means of fostering a continuously developing intellectual and social attainment intimately tied to disciplinary learning. (25)