Revised CCCC Proposal

Where Have We Come From and Where Will We Go?: Twenty-Five Years of Engineering Communication Research

In 1984, IEEE Transactions on Education published a special issue on “developing the ability to communicate” with a focus on engineering students. In 1999, Language and Learning Across the Disciplines (LLAD) published a similarly themed special issue in anticipation of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology’s (ABET) revision in 2000 of required student learning outcomes to put more emphasis on soft skills, including effective communication. In 2008, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication published a special issue on communication in engineering curricula. These 1984 and 2008 special issues bookend a timeline along which the conversation about engineering communication has developed among both composition and engineering education scholars, and provide a framework for investigating that conversation. This timeline mirrors the growth of WAC programs and the concomitant growth of research on writing in the disciplines. Outside of these special issues, scholars in technical communication, such as Dorothy Winsor, have investigated the topic of engineering communication. Her 1996 Writing Like an Engineer: A Rhetorical Education falls within the timeline set by the special issues, and also fits into the WID paradigm by answering its call for more studies of writing in the workplace.

Given this much attention to and scholarship on engineering communication from both pedagogical and workplace perspectives, it’s surprising that there is as yet no longitudinal analysis of approaches to teaching engineering writing and communication. A longitudinal analysis can serve a number of purposes, not least of which is to provide a basis for other researchers in need of historical perspectives for their work. In my paper I will provide just such a historical perspective on the development of research on engineering communication by completing a topic analysis. The analysis will survey not only the contents of these three special issues, but also related works such as Winsor’s. In my analysis, I will focus on the main emphases of each article studied in order to identify trends in research. Which emphases are introduced, which endure, and which lose currency will suggest what roles general composition studies and other fields, such as engineering education, play in defining engineering communication and directing its teaching. My analysis will also suggest further research areas, such as:

• changing conceptions of what defines competency in engineering communication
• changing views of the rationale for and goals of teaching engineering communication
• if the field of composition’s definition of rhetoric has influenced modern engineers
• whether Carolyn Miller’s case for technical communication as a humanistic pursuit has gained traction outside the TC and composition fields
• differences in how compositionists and non-compositionists discuss engineering communication

My longitudinal study will primarily be of interest to scholars studying technical communication and WAC/WID programs. They will learn how discussions of engineering communication in particular have developed over the past 25 years. Additionally, they will see which topics have been most researched and which remain to be thoroughly investigated.

Feminist Rhetorics and Other Voices

I don't have much to say this week, perhaps ironically, given the emphasis in the readings on developing voice and pushing for that voice to be heard. To start, I feel silenced by the two readings on race and racism (Royster and Villanueva). I don't interpret that silencing as oppressive, however. Rather, it's a matter of those readings forcing me to reflect on what I'm actually qualified to speak about, and concomitantly, what conversations I should just keep my trap shut for and listen instead. Royster's "Scene One" makes that point with emotional force. Although I have not, like Royster, "been compelled on too many occasions to count to sit as a well-mannered Other, silently, in a state of tolerance that requires me to be as expressionless as I can manage, while colleagues who occupy a place of entitlement different from my own talk about the history and achievements of people from my ethnic group, or even about their perceptions of our struggles" (612), that description hurts. I have listened to people discuss what's best for me, or been forced into silence because my experiences or my knowledge are not enough to make others listen. But then, as soon as I write these last words, I question the validity of mapping any of my own experiences onto Royster's. If her point is that others who haven't been there don't get it, then I am trivializing or essentializing or just plain not listening when I immediately react with a comparison to my own experience, which comes out of a much different subject position. Similarly, I hesitate as soon as I try to squirm my way into Villanueva's article. I could write about its rhetorical strategies, or the interesting juxtapositions of transactional and imaginative writings, or his use of Spanish titles. But, without the experience that leads him to choose these strategies, these writings, this multilingualism, what qualifies me to say anything about them?

Here I run into an overlapping issue between attempts to write about racism and attempts to write about ESL/WE. I enjoy the privilege of being white in America; this subject position (I agree with Royster here) has to inform any move I might make in the conversation about racism. When it comes to ESL, I can lay more claim to a right to speak.I grew up bilingual in a Western European country; my sister and I spoke English at home and German at school. On the first day of Kindergarten, I knew how to say "ja," "nein," and "Toilette." Years later, now, I am a supposedly fluent German speaker. Yet, I don't feel like one and I think that's largely because I am not a fluent writer of German. Boo hoo for me. This experience hardly justifies a comparison between me and the ESL students discussed by Zamel and Canagarajah, who take on the unthinkable challenge of pursuing a college degree in a foreign language. Unlike in the discussion of racism, though, I do think that my experience allows me to recognize the enormity of that challenge though, in a way that people who haven't undertaken academic work in an L2 can't. Just the thought of trying to accomplish in German any of the work I currently do (even the reading, but especially the writing, and to some extent the oral communication) just now made me literally shudder. How to translate that empathy to my own teaching? I'm not sure. Certainly, Lu's "can able to" example of a deliberate grammatical choice made by an ESL student (cited in Canagarajah) makes me wonder how many such deliberate choices I've overlooked in student papers. Huzzah. One more worry in the quiver of things-I-should-be-doing-as-a-teacher. [Sidebar: I did read the Zamel. It doesn't fit into the larger point I'm making here about my own voice and right to speak. Perhaps one connection is for a future use to which I would like to put my voice: Carrying out Zamel's belief that "our role in our institutions ought not to be defined solely by the service we perform for other faculty...but in helping faculty understand the role they need to begin to play in working with all students" (511).]

So on to the feminist writings. Flynn's 1988 "Composing as a Woman" got me hot and bothered for reasons which Ritchie and Boardman nicely summarized in their 1999 "Feminism in Composition." They quote Eileen Schell arguing that "femininist pedagogy, although compelling, may reinforce rather than critique or transform patriarchal structures by reinscribing what Magda Lewis call the 'woman as caretaker ideology'" (598). This issue lies at the heart of my own intellectual and emotional grappling with feminist theory, its history, and its applications. I worry about spending too much time and effort on gender. I worry that the process may reify gendered categories. At the same time, we all know that ignoring existing gender categories, or sexism, or heterosexism, or the many other forms of discrimination and oppression that feminist theory calls attention doesn't make them go away. Because of this concern, I very much appreciated Ritchie and Boardman's take on the state of feminism in the field. I think they handle the potentially divisive and destructive aspects of feminism very well. Interestingly, I should note also, this is the one arena that I feel have a leg to stand on and a voice worth listening to, since I am a woman. Yet, when I think about my experiences thus far in the field, I have little to say on the topic of gender. The main area that my gender ever becomes an issue is in interactions with students. Perhaps that's all the more reason why I should adopt a feminist pedagogy. I don't know. I'll be quiet now.

Working Annotated Bibliography

Just this morning, I realized that there have been three special issues on communication in engineering curricula, published by three separate journals, over the last three decades. I couldn't pass up this framework for doing a longitudinal review of views on/approaches to/epistemologies associated with teaching engineering communication. So I scrapped my big ol' list and a few other annotations and started from scratch. The following bibliography lists all the contents of the three issues, as well as two other articles, which provide a starting point and midpoint view of the issue unassociated with the special issues themselves. The Miller article in particular, I believe, will inform the way that I survey these issues; I can trace the influence of her idea of TC as humanistic through these issues to see how it develops, changes, and/or is influenced by other views or fields.

IEEE Transactions on Education 27.3 (1984).
Special Issue on Developing the Ability to Communicate (Focus: Engineering Students)

Bostian, Frieda F. "Technical Writing-‘Very Useful Stuff.’" Education, IEEE Transactions on 27.3 (1984): 120-4. Web.

Casari, Laura E. "Required: Three Hours in Technical Communications-Paradigm for a Paradox." Education, IEEE Transactions on 27.3 (1984): 115-19. Web.

Coney, Mary B., and Judith A. Ramey. "A Communication Curriculum in Engineering Education: An Alternative Model." Education, IEEE Transactions on 27.3 (1984): 137-42. Web.
Coney and Ramey claim that the traditional engineering education treats writing as a skill. As such, it can be learned and mastered early in the curriculum. Their program at the University of Washington models a different approach, in which students develop their knowledge of communication in concert with their changing, and increasingly sophisticated, engineering projects. While the authors do not specifically refer to rhetoric as a concern in their model curriculum, their focus on the ability to communicate with various audiences suggests rhetorical concerns. I can use this article to outline what, at the time, was a fairly innovative approach to engineering communication education, which feels very similar to the burgeoning WAC movement of the 80s.

Georgopoulos, Chris J., and Voula C. Georgopoulos. "From University Term Papers to Industry Technical Reports an Attempt to Bridge the Existing Gap." Education, IEEE Transactions on 27.3 (1984): 143-7. Web.

Gwiasda, Karl E. "Of Classrooms and Contexts: Teaching Engineers to Write Wrong." Education, IEEE Transactions on 27.3 (1984): 148-50. Web.

Joenk, R. J. and Jones, Edwin C. "Scanning the Issue." Education, IEEE Transactions on 27.3 (1984): 113-4. Web.
In their introduction to this special issue, Joenk and Jones (editors of IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication and IEEE Transactions on Education, respectively) describe the issue’s origin in the “frequency” of anecdotal commentary about engineers who can design and build, but not communicate. This “evidence” undercuts ABET’s accreditation standards, which required students to be competent communicators. They conclude that engineering education does not adequately prepare graduates for the communication tasks of the workplace, thus bringing the two publications’ interests into alignment. The editors also summarize the issue’s contents, dividing it into articles that deal with specific tech-comm courses and articles with applications to broader tech-comm training. This introduction allows me to establish what impetus pushed professional societies in the 1980s to turn their attention specifically to engineering communication. I can also use it to highlight the ubiquitous link between pedagogy and professionalization which appears throughout the tech-comm field.

Keyser, George F., and Eugene M. De Loatch. "Learning through Writing in an Engineering Course." Education, IEEE Transactions on 27.3 (1984): 125-8. Web.

Potvin, Janet H. "Using Team Reporting Projects to Teach Concepts of Audience and Written, Oral, and Interpersonal Communication Skills." Education, IEEE Transactions on 27.3 (1984): 129-36. Web.

Language and Learning Across the Disciplines3.2 (1999) Special Issue – Communication Across the Engineering Curriculum

Dowell, E.H. “Introduction: Four Carrots and A Stick.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 3.2 (1999): 13-18. Web.
Fifteen years after the IEEE Transactions on Education’s special issue on engineering communication, Dowell bemoans the lack of communication training in engineering curricula. This training is vital, he argues, because of the proliferation of technology, the rise of globalism, and the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of most engineering projects. Moreover, Dowell predicts that upcoming changes to ABET criteria will force engineering programs to more narrowly define and demonstrate students’ effective communication skills. I can use Dowell’s introduction to provide an overview of why engineers valued communication skills in 1999, and what broader contexts they used to justify those skills. It also provides a comparison to the more professionally-oriented call for communication skills in 1984, by focusing more on non-engineering audiences and the role of technology in teaching and facilitating communication.

Youra, S. “Letter from the Guest Editor.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 3.2 (1999): 1-12. Web.

Theory and Practice Section

Broadhead, G. J. “Addressing Multiple Goals for Engineering Writing: The Role of Course-Specific Websites.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 3.2 (1999): 19-43. Web.

Irish, R. “Engineering Thinking: Using Benjamin Bloom and William Perry to Design Assignments.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 3.2 (1999): 83-102. Web.

Norgaard, R. “Negotiating Expertise in Disciplinary ‘Contact Zones.’” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 3.2 (1999): 44-63. Web.

Perelman, L. C. “The Two Rhetorics: Design and Interpretation in Engineering and Humanistic Discourse.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 3.2 (1999): 64-82. Web.
Following in the footsteps of Carolyn Millers’ 1979 “A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing,” Perelman traces two different rhetorical traditions which give rise to the differences between writing for the humanities and writing for engineering, illustrated by contrasting undergraduate humanities and engineering writing assignments. She traces both traditions to classical rhetoric and posits that WAC programs provide a way to reintegrate these two traditions and their epistemological bases. This article provides a theoretical framework with which I can compare views about what role writing should play in engineering—or other technical—curricula. I can also use it to show the increasing use of theory, as opposed to appeals for professionalization, to justify attention to engineering communication.

Programs and Projects Section

Donnell, Jeffrey A., Joseph Petraglia-Babri, and Amanda C. Gable. “Writing vs. Content, Skills vs. Rhetoric: More and Less False Dichotomies.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 3.2 (1999): 113-117. Web.

McQueeney, Pat. “Cementing Writing: A Writing Partnership with Civil Engineering.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 3.2 (1999): 118-122. Web.

Olds, Barbara M., Jon A. Leydens, and Ronald L. Miller. “A Flexible Model for Assessing WAC Programs.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 3.2 (1999): 123-129. Web.

Shwom, B., Penny Hirsch, Charles Yarnoff, and John Anderson. “Engineering Design and Communication: A Foundational Course for Freshmen.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 3.2 (1999): 107-112. Web.

Williamson, W. J. and Philip H. Sweany. “Linking Communication and Software Design Courses for Professional Development in Computer Science.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 3.2 (1999): 103-106. Web.

IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication51.3 (2008).
Special Issue on Communication in Engineering Curricula

Ballentine, B. D. "Professional Communication and a 'Whole New Mind': Engaging with Ethics, Intellectual Property, Design, and Globalization." Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on 51.3 (2008): 328-40. Web.

Carlson, P. A., and F. C. Berry. "Using Computer-Mediated Peer Review in an Engineering Design Course." Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on 51.3 (2008): 264-79. Web.

Craig, J. L., N. Lerner, and M. Poe. "Innovation Across the Curriculum: Three Case Studies in Teaching Science and Engineering Communication." Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on 51.3 (2008): 280-301. Web.

Leydens, J. A. "Novice and Insider Perspectives on Academic and Workplace Writing: Toward a Continuum of Rhetorical Awareness." Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on 51.3 (2008): 242-63. Web.

Paretti, M. C., and L. D. McNair. "Introduction to the Special Issue on Communication in Engineering Curricula: Mapping the Landscape." Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on 51.3 (2008): 238-41. Web.
Paretti and McNair describe an engineering field which undisputedly values communication and which has worked for several decades to integrate development of communication skills into curricula. They note two major challenges—one persisting, one new—which justify a special issue on the topic: how to bring together expertise in disparate fields (engineering and writing pedagogy); and how to account for changing definitions of effective communication in an increasingly digital world. The introduction also includes a description of common themes taken up by researchers in the field of engineering communication. In mapping the development of the conversation about engineering communication, I can use this introduction to bring us up to date (or almost). The challenges and themes addressed in the issue give the best indication of where we can go from here, as they bring up contemporary concerns that the previous special issues literally couldn’t.

Patton, M. D. "Beyond WI: Building an Integrated Communication." Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on 51.3 (2008): 313-27. Web.

Rutkowski, A. -F, et al. "Communication in Virtual Teams: Ten Years of Experience in Education." Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on 51.3 (2008): 302-12. Web.

Other

Miller, Carolyn R. "A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing." College English. 40 (1979), 610-17. Web.

Williams, Julia M. "Technical Communication, Engineering, and ABET's Engineering Criteria 2000: What Lies Ahead?" Technical Communication 49.1 (2002): 89. Web.
Williams calls on the technical communication field to actively participate in changes to engineering curricula designed to meet ABET’s revised accreditation standards. In 2000, ABET revised its Engineering Criteria to focus on student learning outcomes, rather than number of courses offered; six out of eleven learning outcomes focus on non-technical skills. In particular, Williams points out, the learning outcome of “an ability to communicate effectively” presents an opportunity for technical communicators, both academic and professional, to reevaluate and shape engineering education. Using the case of Rose-Hulman’s preparation for ABET accreditation, Williams argues that communication can and should play a greater role in traditional engineering courses, and that technical communications faculty have a responsibility to help prepare students for the non-technical demands of 21^st century engineering by partnering with engineering faculty, in-house projects, and industry. Following on the heels of Across the Disciplines’ special issues on engineering communication, which preceded ABET’s call for communication as a student learning outcome, this article provides a snapshot of the response to that call. As Williams notes, ABET does not define precisely the methods by which these skills should be assessed, which implies a certain amount of latitude in how they should be defined. The case of Rose-Hulman gives specific curricular description that I can examine for evidence of how they as a program have chosen to define “effective communication.”