Innovations in Composition Programs that Educate … · interview data, and particularly ... neering education, ... to more fully understand the catalysts for curricular innovation

July 2009 Journal of Engineering Education 255

Innovations in Composition Programs thatEducate Engineers: Drivers, Opportunities,and Challenges

JON A. LEYDENS

Division of Liberal Arts and International StudiesColorado School of Mines

JEN SCHNEIDER

Division of Liberal Arts and International StudiesColorado School of Mines

ABSTRACT

Recent developments in engineering education have shaped thenature of composition programs at institutions or programs thatemphasize engineering and science. Among these developmentsare revised accreditation guidelines and a curricular debate with along history. Such developments highlight collaborative opportu-nities between technical and humanities/social sciences faculty.This multi-case study investigates how composition programshave responded to such drivers, opportunities, and challenges.The study draws from historical, observation, document, andinterview data, and particularly interviews with composition pro-gram administrators at six institutions with significant technicalemphases. Findings indicate shifts in historical emphasis on cul-ture and utility, and three contemporary responses. Reductions,transformations, and innovations are occurring in first-year com-munication courses. Also, multimodal communications, includ-ing written, oral, and visual components, are being integratedacross multiple instructional contexts. Finally, strong cross-curricular communication programs are emerging in which com-position faculty partner with technical faculty. Implications ofthese findings are discussed.

Keywords: composition programs, culture-utility debate,interdisciplinary collaborative opportunities

I. INTRODUCTION

Over one hundred years ago, the future of the humanities andsocial sciences (HSS) in engineering education looked bleak. In1896, at the annual meeting of the Society for the Promotion ofEngineering Education (SPEE), the presidential address acknowl-edged the crowded density of the engineering curriculum andnoted that “cultural” courses may need to be eliminated. In 1905the SPEE presidential address featured an express hope to abandonall requirements in English and foreign languages, as reportedlythe HSS disciplines were “considered to have little merit to the

engineer” (Gianniny, 2004, p. 327). More than a century after thesecomments, the outlook for HSS faculty who are engineering edu-cators is considerably brighter, thanks in part to recent changes inaccreditation criteria. As researchers have noted recently, “Thecapacity to serve multiple purposes is one of the enduring strengthsof liberal education, and the transition to EC 2000 [in the 1990s]should provide renewed demonstrations of this quality” (Ollis,Neeley, and Luegenbiehl 2004, p. xvii). As discussed below, EC2000 represented a significant shift in accreditation criteria byABET.

In this article, we focus on one aspect of HSS, compositionprograms at universities that have engineering education as a pri-mary focus, and we discuss how contemporary findings intersectwith a long-running debate over the role of HSS at such universi-ties. Faculty in composition programs are generally responsible forfirst-year writing/composition courses and are often involved incross-disciplinary and disciplinary writing initiatives. This multi-case study investigates how multiple composition programs haveresponded to various drivers, opportunities, and challenges in engi-neering education, such as revised accreditation guidelines, ever-decreasing space in the engineering curriculum, and a continuationof curricular pressures with a long history. The current study alsolooks at some opportunities and challenges for effective partner-ships between two groups of engineering educators—compositionand engineering faculty. Such partnerships may serve as illustra-tions of the promise and pitfalls of collaborations between andamong disciplines.

Although our inquiry started with the broad overarching intentto more fully understand the catalysts for curricular innovation incomposition programs that educate engineers, we followed thequalitative principle of emergent research design (Creswell, 1998,2009), in which some questions emerge in the research processrather than being stated a priori. Hence, our research expanded toencompass the following questions:

• How do composition faculty at technical universities con-ceptualize and enact the teaching and learning of communi-cation? What opportunities and barriers exist to innovationin the teaching of communication?

• In an environment of increasing competition for space in thecurriculum, how can mutually beneficial partnerships thrivebetween engineering and composition faculty?

• How do drivers such as EC 2000 and the culture-utilitydebate inform ideas about the future of communication pro-grams at such universities?

To understand how composition programs have responded torecent curricular influences, it is important to first understand howcommunication is positioned within the engineering education

community and the theoretical backgrounds that inform potentialcollaborative opportunities between composition and engineeringfaculty.

A. The Importance of Communication in Engineering EducationEngineering education literature places strong emphasis on the

importance of effective communication to excel as an engineer. Forinstance, the National Academy of Engineering’s profile of theEngineer of 2020 stresses that

… good engineering will require good communication.Engineering has always engaged multiple stakeholders—government, private industry, and the public. In the newcentury the parties that engineering ties together willincreasingly involve interdisciplinary teams, globally diverseteam members, public officials, and a global customer base.We envision a world where communication is enabled by anability to listen effectively as well as to communicatethrough oral, visual, and written mechanisms. Modernadvances in technology will necessitate the effective use ofvirtual communication tools. The increasing imperative foraccountability will necessitate an ability to communicateconvincingly and to shape the opinions and attitudes ofother engineers and the public (National Academy ofEngineering, 2004, p. 55).

The importance of communication is also evident in the AmericanSociety of Civil Engineers’ (ASCE) body of knowledge for the twenty-first century, wherein one of the professional outcomes focuses on

[m]eans of communication [that] include listening,observing, reading, speaking, writing, and graphics. Thecivil engineer must communicate effectively with technicaland non-technical individuals and audiences in a variety ofsettings. Use of these means of communication by civilengineers requires an understanding of communicationwithin professional practice. Fundamentals ofcommunication should be acquired during formal education(American Society of Civil Engineers, 2008, p.139).

The importance of effective communication is also evident in a2006 report on the impact of EC 2000: in a survey of over 1,600employers representing diverse geographic locations, industry types,company sizes, educational attainment levels, and experience evalu-ating engineers, employers rated the importance of the ability ofnew engineering hires to communicate effectively at the top of all stu-dent outcome Criterion 3 competencies (a-k), even above primarilytechnical ones (Lattuca, Terenzini, and Volkwein, 2006).

B. Theoretical Backgrounds Informing Collaborative Opportuni-ties between Composition and Engineering Faculty

Collaborations between composition and engineering faculty canoccur in designing first-year composition courses, multimodalcommunication initiatives, and a range of disciplinary writing pro-jects such as design or field courses. Possibilities for the collabora-tions are discussed later.

Today, many composition programs advocate that disciplinarywriting is best taught as a partnership between composition andengineering faculty. Significant involvement of disciplinary faculty is

crucial, as they know best the habits of mind, methods of inquiry,ways of knowing, and other direct influences on disciplinary writing.Such writing encompasses, in the case of engineering, both generalengineering writing and engineering discipline-specific writing (e.g.,aerospace, mechanical, or petroleum engineering writing, etc.). Def-initions of writing in the disciplines accentuate the key role discipli-nary faculty play in teaching disciplinary writing, especially when part-nering with faculty consultants from composition programs. Forinstance, researchers at Georgetown University highlight discipli-nary faculty’s vital role in collapsing the artificial dichotomy betweenlearning disciplinary writing and disciplinary content:

[T]o know a discipline is to know, through attention towriting, how one forms the truth, makes it understood andpersuasive, and thereby contributes to the collaborativestudy undertaken by the community of scholars and writerswho constitute that discipline.… We believe that, ratherthan putting … aside [scholarly interests and commitments],[disciplinary faculty] should make them central and usethem to guide their students as emerging writers within aneducational community (Slevin, Fort, and O’Connor, 1990,p.12).

Ample scholarship supports this notion that the teaching ofdisciplinary writing is integral to initiating apprentice or novicemembers into a disciplinary community (e.g., Berkenkotter,Huckin, and Ackerman, 1988; Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1993;Kelly, Chen, and Crawford, 1998; Williams and Colomb, 1995;Winsor, 1996). Such scholarship builds on the notion that theteaching of writing is a shared responsibility spread across all disci-plines (e.g., Bernhardt, 1985; Connelly and Irving, 1976; Davis,1984; Maimon, 1981). Thus, engineering faculty who seek to out-source the teaching of disciplinary writing to non-engineering de-partments may be clinging to an obsolete model that no longer holdscredibility. Rather, the current model of teaching disciplinary writ-ing involves a variety of partnerships between composition facultyand engineering faculty. Hence, programs that seek to teach discipli-nary writing are distinguished by mutually beneficial collaborationsbetween such faculty. In such programs, the teaching of disciplinarywriting can be viewed as one means of achieving multiple objectives:facilitating novice members’ entrance into a field, learning of coursecontent, and augmenting critical thinking competencies.

II. METHODS

The intent of this multi-case study (Bogdan and Biklen, 2003)was to understand how specific composition programs are innovat-ing in the face of the challenges and opportunities presented by EC2000 as well as other drivers.

A. Data SourcesWe have drawn from four data sources: histories of engineering

education, an observation, documents, and interviews, with empha-sis on the latter. The historical literature was collected by focusingon HSS and composition-related themes in engineering education.Specifically, we examined ways in which a debate played out be-tween groups emphasizing a broader cultural education and thosemore focused on functional utility. Although the review of historical

256 Journal of Engineering Education July 2009

literature was intended to be neither comprehensive nor definitive, ithelps establish the parameters in which composition programs func-tioned historically in engineering education.

The observation occurred at the 2006 Conference on CollegeComposition and Communication, when participants at the WritingAcross the Engineering Curriculum Special Interest Group (SIG)meeting shared information about their respective programs, a topicmutually agreed upon via email prior to the conference. We alsoconsulted one set of documents consisting of the written programdescriptions of those attending the 2006 SIG meeting. Participantsat this SIG gave their consent to include these program descriptionsin this study, and sent them for posting on a publicly accessible Website. Another set of documents used in the study consists of publiclyavailable Web documents at each of the six institutions studied;these documents provided pre-study information on student popu-lations, degrees offered, diverse composition program approaches,and in some cases programmatic challenges and successes.

We also interviewed the current or recent directors of these sixprograms in spring 2006. Science, technology, engineering, andmathematics (STEM) disciplines dominate the curricula at five ofthese institutions, which can provide us with a clear picture of thepotential for mutually supportive relationships between composi-tion and engineering faculty.

All interviewees signed IRB-approved informed consent forms,which ensured their and their institution’s anonymity, and eachaudio-taped interview was then transcribed and analyzed. The in-terviews were semi-structured, meaning standard questions wereasked yet interviews could divert from the standard set to exploreareas of interest or uniqueness. All standard interview questionsappear in the Appendix.

B. Analysis Procedures We analyzed the historical literature based on the extent to which

it informed emerging understandings of the contexts in whichcompositions programs were created, transformed, abolished, orrisked abolishment in the twentieth century. Particular attentionwas paid to large historical shifts in composition program emphasesor composition-related movements in HSS.

To better understand the selected communication programs andtheir shaping forces, we used the constant comparative method(Bogdan and Biklen, 2003; Glaser, 1978) to analyze the data, pri-marily the interview data. This method involves a highly recursiveprocess in which we:

• Began interview data collection.• Looked for key issues, recurrent events (later called categories

of focus).• Collected more data via interviews that provided additional

incidents of the categories of focus to better understand therange of viewpoints on and dimensions in these categories.

• Wrote about the categories, describing and accounting for allthe incidents in the data while searching the data for newincidents.

• Analyzed the data to understand key processes and relation-ships in the emerging model (categories of focus combined).

• Engaged in coding and writing as the analysis focused on thecore categories.

• Described the model and its components, categories of focusand subcategories as they have emerged from the data(described in the Findings section).

C. Methods for Establishing TrustworthinessTrustworthiness refers to how qualitative researchers determine

whether they have accurately described the settings and events,participants’ perspectives, or content of documents (Guba, 1981;Skrtic, 1985). A parallel concept to the quantitative research termrigor, trustworthiness in qualitative research is generally estab-lished by using various data collection and/or data analysis meth-ods (Creswell, 1988; Leydens, Moskal, and Pavelich, 2004). Toestablish the trustworthiness of our data, we used five methods inparticular, (the last four of which are adapted from Creswell,1988):

1) Separate Coding—Each author coded the interview tran-scripts separately, and then shared perceptions of the pre-dominant recurring themes, revealing a high degree of inter-rater reliability in categories of focus.

2) Purposeful Sampling—We specifically sought participantswho would be knowledgeable about writing and communica-tion initiatives at peer institutions.

3) Triangulation—By examining crucial intersections, we trian-gulated the interview data with all observation data and thecollected documents; collectively, these three sources werealso viewed in light of select historical literature.

4) Rich, Thick Description—We have attempted to describethe salient participant perspectives in sufficient detail, withinspace limitations, to allow readers to make informed deci-sions regarding transferability to their own contexts.

5) Member Checking—We sent the relevant passages regard-ing each institution’s profile and all findings statements toeach respective interviewee, asking each to comment on theaccuracy of any statement regarding their respective institu-tions; no major inaccuracies were identified, and any minorupdate or clarification the interviewees suggested was madebefore publication. Then in December 2007 we sent a fullmanuscript draft (minus the discussion) and requested anyupdates or clarifications.

D. Sample Selection and Institutional ProfilesSeveral years ago, a senior administrator at our institution com-

piled a list of six institutions whose liberal arts programs were seenas “peers” of our own. Although the criteria by which these particu-lar peers were chosen were never made clear, for many years, theseABET-accredited institutions were used as bases of comparison incurricular and budget decisions. One of our motives for conductingthis study, therefore, was to identify current trends occurring withinand across these composition programs. The six institutions or pro-grams analyzed in this study came from this list. All six have as acore mission the education of engineers or applied scientists, and asummary of institutional characteristics appears in Table 1.

The profiles of the institutions in this study include geographiclocation, public or private status, enrollment, Carnegie classifica-tion, and degrees offered. In Table 1, institutions are listed from Ato F in the order in which the interviews occurred.

By way of comparison, our institution is a four-year publicuniversity, located in the Rocky Mountain west. Classified ashaving high research activity, our institution enrolls fewer than4,500 undergraduate and graduate students. It offers undergrad-uate and graduate degrees primarily in engineering and science,as well as in economics and business and international politicaleconomy.


Although those interviewed all identified themselves as eitherserving or having recently served in the primary leadership role intheir respective Humanities, Composition, Communication, orWriting Programs, their actual titles vary widely, and also to protectanonymity, all directors are here called Writing Program Adminis-trators (WPA). WPAs are identified by their institutional affilia-tions, so the WPA at Institution A is WPA-A, and so on. Althoughconvenient, this term is admittedly also limiting since many of theinterviewees, as we will see, focus on multiple communicative prac-tices and have a variety of job titles and career paths.

III. FINDINGS

Findings are related in two sections. First, a review of the long-standing debates over HSS at STEM institutions provides histori-cal context for answering our research question about how such de-bates shape the current realities and futures of compositionprograms. Second, our interview, observation, and document datasuggest contemporary answers to our questions about these pro-grams and the opportunities for and barriers to their success. Com-bined, both data sets suggest future trajectories for collaborativeopportunities among faculty.

A. Historical Context for Curricular Influences on Compositionin Engineering Education: The Culture-Utility Debate

To understand the context in which composition programshave sought continuous improvement in response to ABET andother curricular influences, it is important to understand the histo-ry of a debate between cultural and utilitarian emphases within en-gineering education. How did we shift from calls for the elimina-tion of non-utilitarian curricular components in the 1890s and1900s, as noted earlier, to the present circumstances? How doesthe past shed light on the present, and what do both suggest for the

future? Since the culture-utility debate informs the parameters inwhich curricular innovation is both made possible and constrained,a brief review of its history is warranted. For our research ques-tions, the culture-utility debate provides the historical backdropthat has shaped innovations in the teaching and learning of com-munication, potential interdisciplinary partnerships for communi-cation, and ideas about the future of communication in engineer-ing education.

We should note that herein two important histories are beingoccasionally conflated or summarized: the histories of HSS and com-position programs, which contain both numerous differences andoverlaps, and the histories of composition studies and technical writ-ing, also similar yet distinct. Although important, a thorough treat-ment of these histories rests outside the scope of this overview.

What this overview does suggest is that, on the one hand, HSSfaculty have historically perceived engineering students as futuremembers of the engineering profession as well as citizens and com-plex human beings. Accordingly, they should not just be welltrained but also well educated, a hallmark of a university education.For instance, HSS faculty such as those teaching literature andcomposition recognized early on “that the development of fluencyand structure in a language requires practice and widespread read-ing” and that “language study embodies a world view—elements ofcosmology, epistemology, aesthetic, and ethical-base for under-standing and using language” (Gianniny, 2004, pp. 322–23). Onthe other hand, many engineering faculty traditionally held a utili-tarian view wherein language was understood merely as a tool(Gianniny, 2004). The utilitarian sentiment often extended cate-gorically to all HSS disciplines. This tension is explored in greaterdetail below.

1) A Brief History of the Culture-Utility Debate: The culture-utility debate suggests significant fluctuations in the nature andamount of value placed on composition programs. Communicationand composition was one of the first disciplinary areas to be formally


Table 1. Institutional profiles.

recognized and accepted within the general framework of engineer-ing education, and the utilitarian vs. culture debate was particularlyvibrant there (Gianniny, 2004). For instance, before 1887, MIT’sonly writing requirement was a one-semester freshman coursecalled Rhetoric and English Composition, followed by three se-mesters of English literature. In the former course, both the wordand emphasis on rhetoric were dropped in 1887, as was one of therequired literature courses, to be replaced by a practical junior-levelcomposition course. As one historian noted, “[thus began] adecades-long negotiation between the competing claims of cultureand utility” (Russell, 2002, p. 108). These negotiations betweenculture and utility are described in brief in Table 2. Although thetable oversimplifies some historical trends, it serves as a rough guideto culture-utility emphasis shifts. In 1896, a former composition in-structor at Harvard was hired to head the MIT composition pro-gram, which was “explicitly designed to meet the writing needs ofengineers” (Russell, 2002, p. 109). That composition directorstressed a largely utilitarian approach to writing, wherein hisemphasis was “on the demands of industry rather than on those ofliterary culture” (Russell, 2002, p. 110).

At MIT as at other institutions, the utilitarian or cultural em-phases of composition programs were cyclical. Although from theearly 1890s to 1915 the utilitarian emphasis reigned over a sec-ondary emphasis on literature and culture, new MIT English de-

partment leadership in 1915 reversed that emphasis, and “utilitarianwriting instruction was marginalized into specialized courses, apattern that was repeated many times elsewhere” (Russell, 2002,p. 119). With the early exception of MIT, models appeared later inwhich (what are today called) composition specialists were hired todirect engineering communication programs. In 1919, such facultywere hired by Ohio State, Case Institute, and Rensselaer Institute,followed a year later by Purdue (Gianniny, 2004).

2) Curricular Impacts of the Culture-Utility Debate: The culture-utility debate had a variety of impacts on engineering educationcurricula, with many of those impacts manifesting a disjuncture be-tween transformative intentions and actual practice. After theWickenden Report, a 1923–1929 study of engineering education,engineering accreditation criteria fashioned by ABET’s predeces-sor, the Engineers’ Council for Professional Development, formallyrecognized the place of English instruction (namely writing andspeaking) within the engineering curriculum (Gianniny, 2004).One other crucial outcome of the Wickenden Report was the real-ization that engineering and engineering education are alwaysembedded in social, economic, and political contexts. The reportstates, “It is fairly certain that the engineer of tomorrow will con-front new social ideals and new economic standards” (Wickenden,1923–29, p. 1048). In an implicit nod toward the culture side of thedebate, the Wickenden Report’s call for integration of HSS and


Table 2. Shifts in historical emphasis on culture and utility in composition and HSS.


technical education emphasized that an “engineering curriculum ofa liberal type, with all its elements—scientific, humanistic, andtechnological—closely selected and highly integrated, has this valuefor the modern industrial scientist in even higher degree” (p. 1072).However, despite the import of this report, “…through the 1940s,engineering remained, at most institutions, a highly practical sub-ject” (Prados, Peterson, and Lattuca, p. 167).

The culture-utility debate also manifested itself in the 1940s and1950s, when guidelines for HSS disciplines were established andsolidified (Gianniny, 2004). The minimum of one half-year forHSS in the engineering curriculum was (re)affirmed by major re-ports on engineering education, including the Hammond (1940),Grinter (1955), Gullette (1956), and Olmstead (1968) reports(Schachterle, 2004). From the 1950s to the 1990s, the widespreadrequirement was that HSS courses comprised approximately 13 to20 percent of the undergraduate engineering curriculum (Gianniny,2004). However, the culture-utility debate was not exclusivelyabout quantity but also about the character or nature of an HSSeducation.

Curricular, accreditation, and other influences attempted todrive reforms, and in the case of HSS reform, often unsuccessfully.In 1956, ASEE’s Gullette Report outlined a HSS curricular plan,and one of its intentions was to remove the service course stigma ofHSS curricula (Gianniny, 2004). Despite the fact that liberal edu-cation has traditionally involved mathematics, science, humanities,and social sciences (Parrish, 2004), the Gullette Report recom-mended two stems, professional (math, science, engineering cours-es) and general education (HSS courses), a split still resonatingtoday as “hard” and “soft skills.” Despite its intentions, in someways, that stem dichotomy worked in the opposite direction of theintegration called for by the Wickenden Report.

So why did the Gullette Report’s HSS curricular plan, with onlyisolated exceptions, fail? By trying to remove the service stigma,HSS faculty “also removed the direct interest of [utilitarian] engi-neering faculty” (Gianniny, 2004, p. 336). Certainly the Cold Warand the post-Sputnik era also intensified utilitarian desires (Lucena,2005). Even though the Gullette Report was vetted by engineering,science, and HSS faculty, HSS faculty were also able to carry outfew of the proposals because “[c]ompetition for time in the curricu-lum, and priorities for increased science and mathematics, claimedthe attention of engineering educators” (Gianniny, 2004, p. 336).Another stated reason was that “there were no [HSS] disciplines—no communities of recognized scholars to support the most innova-tive proposals” (Gianniny, 2004, p. 337). Therein lies an intriguingparadox: whereas the absence of strong disciplines weakened theireffectiveness then, today it is the presence of strongly establisheddisciplines, as we will see, that are said to potentially inhibit curric-ular reform.

Although the utilitarian sentiment often extended categoricallyto all HSS disciplines, many theoretical exceptions to this viewpointexisted. For instance, a 1962 ASEE report, when describing theimportance of nontechnical courses, implied a tripartite focus onengineers, citizens, and human beings. The report says that the en-gineer needs to successfully communicate with others “both duringand after working hours” and “requires more than technical knowl-edge.… He [or she] must live with other people both on and off thejob. He [or she] is a citizen as well as an employee and must partici-pate with other citizens in the making of democratic decisions.”The report goes on to underscore the importance of “occupational

and cultural development” (ASEE, 1962, p.30). Still, little evidenceexists that such ideas had significant, widespread impact on theengineering curriculum.

Several parallels between HSS and composition are common inpart because of their unique histories within ASEE. Although theEnglish Committee and later English Division within ASEE pre-ceded its counterparts in HSS, English and HSS merged in 1965 tobecome what is today the Liberal Education Division (Gianniny,2004).

3) Accreditation Criteria and the Culture-Utility Debate: Inter-secting with the culture-utility debate, new accreditation criteriahave opened doors to greater ambiguity and opportunities for inter-disciplinary collaboration. To understand this shift, it is necessary torecognize that before EC 2000, previous accreditation criteria werecriticized on multiple grounds. For instance, in those criteria theemphasis was “on examining what courses students passed ratherthan what they learned and could do, as well as a lack of encourage-ment for experimentation with new pedagogy and curricula” due totheir excessively prescriptive character (Parrish, 2004, p. 6). Anoth-er complaint about the pre-EC 2000 criteria focused on the ideathat the criteria only ensured quality around a “low common de-nominator” and that they forced engineering educators “into aProcrustean bed where all that really mattered for accreditation wasassuring visitors that every graduate had passed a minimal numberof courses distributed among various sorting bins” (Schachterle,2004, p. 12). These and other weaknesses came most fully to thefore in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when significant input andnegotiation from industry, government, and academia helpedABET revamp the criteria (Parrish, 2004; Prados, Peterson, andLattuca, 2005).

Whether EC 2000 is a blessing, a curse, or something in be-tween to HSS and composition programs appears to be a matter ofperspective. As some researchers have noted, “[b]revity and open-endedness are two of the most striking features of EC 2000 criteria;the latter, therefore, not only permit but demand interpretation”(Ollis, Neeley, and Luegenbiehl, 2004, p. xiv). Several perspectivesaddress this ambiguity, and two of those are described here. Viewedpessimistically, EC 2000’s elimination of the half-year floor and theone-year ceiling (the 13–20 percent range noted above) may beinterpreted as a loss of job security or any substantive role for HSSfaculty in engineering education (Schachterle, 2004). Further, asnoted above, the history of engineering education is replete withfailed attempts to enact widespread HSS reform. One researcherlays part of the blame for that history on past accreditation practices,noting that engineering students have received little and inadequateliberal education “primarily because of the overwhelming densityof requirements and resulting emphases placed by evaluators onthe technical portion of the educational programs” (Parrish, 2004,pp. 8–9).

However, many view with optimism a number of indicators. Forinstance, one author sees promise in the role EC 2000 plays in pro-moting interdisciplinarity. “[The need] to assure that graduates areadequately prepared to enter and continue the practice of engineer-ing…surely will require less in the way of narrow, ‘stove pipe’ cur-ricula that heretofore were concentrated on providing considerableexpertise within a given discipline” (Parrish, 2004, p. 9). Otherresearchers also see windows opening in disciplinary walls. “Webelieve that EC 2000 invites the full participation of all faculty in-volved in [the] education of engineers” (xiv), notes one research

team, adding that “[t]he important difference [between old andnew ABET accreditation criteria] is that HSS elements are now tobe seen in relation to, rather than distinctive from, other elements”(Ollis, Neeley, and Luegenbiehl, 2004, p. xv). Within this perspec-tive, well established disciplines may present a barrier to realizingthe spirit of EC 2000 if these disciplines cannot draw from theirrespective strengths and simultaneously recognize the benefits ofinter- and multidisciplinary collaboration.

Hope may also lie within the criteria themselves. For instance,the program outcomes in EC 2000’s Criterion 3 specify what grad-uating students should know and be able to do, and only four ofthose 11 are primarily technical (ABET, 2007):

a. An ability to apply knowledge of mathematics, science,and engineering

b. An ability to design and conduct experiments, as well asto analyze and interpret data

e. An ability to identify, formulate, and solve engineeringproblems

k. An ability to use the techniques, skills, and modernengineering tools necessary for engineering practice

The remaining outcomes feature various degrees of nontechnicalemphases (italicized):

c. An ability to design a system, component, or process tomeet desired needs within realistic constraints such aseconomic, environmental, social, political, ethical, health andsafety, manufacturability, and sustainability

d. An ability to function on multi-disciplinary teamsf. An understanding of professional and ethical responsibilityg. An ability to communicate effectively h. The broad education necessary to understand the impact of

engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental,and societal context

i. A recognition of the need for, and an ability to engage in life-long learning

j. A knowledge of contemporary issues

But perhaps even this distinction between technical and non-technical misses the implicit intention of EC 2000 to blur suchdistinctions. EC 2000 provides insight into the long-running utili-tarian vs. cultural debate. As Schachterle suggests, “Unlike so muchof the previous literature about liberal education within engineeringeducation, Criterion 3 does not separate between ‘soft skills’ and‘hard skills,’ nor does it relegate (as often was the case earlier) hu-manities and social sciences to a second stem” (Schachterle, 2004,p. 22). By focusing on what students learn and are able to do, EC2000 is “a strategy far more in accord with actual professional prac-tice, which demands results, [and] it acknowledges the importanceof the historical diversity of American educational institutions,” fos-tering reflection on and more substantive connections between in-stitutional and programmatic missions, goals, and objectives(Schachterle, 2004, p. 13). Futhermore, Schachterle adds, “[underEC 2000, students] must perform effectively as professionals, andpresumably also as citizens (outcomes f, h, and j) and as self-reflective humans (outcomes f-j)” (Schachterle, 2004, p. 22).

As a result of this complex historical debate between culture andutility, composition programs have often found themselves in flux,

depending on what values are expressed through the debate at par-ticular times. The history detailed here and our interview data sug-gest that composition faculty and administrators have frequentlyperceived their programs to vary from being at risk to being morecrucial to engineering education. Shifts in the debate have accordedthem variable amounts of institutional status, funding, or support.These programs and faculty have developed a variety of ways torespond to such fluctuations, ranging from developing partnershipswith technical faculty to innovating integrative programs, initia-tives, and teaching and learning strategies that highlight their value.We explore these strategies in greater depth below.

In 2004, researchers mused that “[a] decade from now, we willknow if this freedom [catalyzed by EC 2000] brought either inven-tion by and integration of faculty, or simply curricular anarchy andloss of a unique opportunity to bridge the ‘two cultures’ of C.P.Snow” (Ollis, Neeley, and Luegenbiehl, 2004, p. xii). As we standnow closer to the end of that decade, the time has come for an up-date. The trends described below should be watched closely forwhat they tell us about the state of the culture-utility debate andcollaborative opportunities now and in the coming years.

B. Interview Data FindingsFrom the interview study data, three primary findings emerged: • Reductions, transformations, and innovations are occurring

in first-year communication courses that feature a range ofHSS content.

• Multimodal communication components including written,oral, and visual modes are being integrated across multiplecurricular and instructional contexts.

• Strong communication across the curriculum (CxC) pro-grams are emerging in which composition faculty are work-ing with technical faculty to develop curricular goals and fos-ter communication within the disciplines.

As noted below, these three findings suggest that in some con-texts the more than century-old culture-utility debate continues toinform curriculum design. However, the ABET redesign and otherdrivers are changing the way technical universities integrate com-munication instruction in engineering education, thus changing thenature of the debate. Evidence exists to suggest interdisciplinaryinnovations and a loosening of previous dichotomies between hardand soft skills, between a first and second stem.

1) First-Year Composition in Flux: Downsizing, Transforming,and Innovating in Absentia: One finding that emerged from thestudy data centers on changes that have occurred or are occurring infirst-year composition (FYC) courses, which generally emphasizehumanities thematic content and include direct written composi-tion instruction. Whereas writing-in-the-disciplines courses teachdisciplinary writing, FYC courses typically teach general academicwriting. Yet these two writing foci are interrelated. Among otherpurposes, FYC builds a foundation for disciplinary writing by fos-tering students’ entrance into a larger community of academic andpublic writing, preparing students for more specialized disciplinarywriting. In many FYC courses, students develop an awareness of di-verse disciplinary ways of communicating, use writing as a thinkingtool, as well as apply general (and portable) writing principles, suchas the importance of marshalling data to support claims. Further,the value of FYC emanates from critical thinking principlesstudents begin to learn, such as in the areas of invention, application,analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Given FYC’s broad applicability



to students’ future competencies in writing, thinking, and learning,faculty from across the disciplines have a stake in FYC. TrackingFYC developments functions as a sort of barometer for the culture-utility debate, and for how some engineering educators are concep-tualizing communication in engineering education contexts.

Within this focus category, three subcategories emerged, whichcenter on reducing or transforming FYC or innovating in its ab-sence. Some of these changes in FYC may be signs that discipli-nary walls are breaking down and that communication is becomingproductively integrated across the curriculum; other changes maysuggest that communication instruction is still marginalized in en-gineering curricula, viewed as primarily utilitarian and, in somecases, expendable.

Downsizing FYC: Two of the institutions in this study, D and E,reduced their FYC requirement from two courses to one beginningin fall 2006. WPA-D indicated that as part of a larger revamping ofits entire core curriculum, Institution D will move from a two-semester sequence to a one-semester course, with similar yetbroadly construed thematic content so instructors can teach to theirindividual strengths. Class sizes will be reduced from 25 to 20, andthe new FYC course will become more writing and communicationintensive; also, more attention will be placed on revision, workloadconsistency across sections, and assessment. Similarly, Institution Ewill also see a two-course sequence become one; in the past, two,four-hour-per-week courses emphasized humanities content forthree hours, writing instruction for one, with significant emphasison peer and instructor feedback and revision. In both institutions,all or almost all FYC courses were to be taught by full-time,tenured/tenure-track faculty; this will mark a departure for Insti-tution E, which previously had among its FYC instructor basegraduate students and doctoral candidates.

Although financial considerations were in the background of allcases, the drivers for this FYC downsizing varied. For InstitutionD, the initial driver was ABET’s shift from stipulating numbers ofcourses to outcomes-based assessment, which drove a broader re-examination of the core curriculum. Another driver involved ten-sions between the perspectives of the engineering and humanitiesprograms, an echo of the long-running debate over utility versusculture. While the engineering faculty saw ABET’s shift as an op-portunity to embed two grammar-based technical writing courseswithin the engineering curriculum, the humanities faculty neitherhad this kind of faculty nor significant interest in teaching suchcourses. Since total engineering student enrollment was on the de-cline and for other complex factors, the humanities side prevailed inadvocating for broader curricular changes, including the develop-ment of the campus-wide communication-intensive course criteriadescribed below. Such changes were seen as a tradeoff. As WPA-Dnoted, on the one hand, the reduction significantly enhanced HSSfaculty’s ability to offer electives for their own majors. On the otherhand, most HSS faculty did not think that the FYC reduction fromtwo semesters to one augmented the quality of students’ overalleducation, even if class sizes dropped from 25 to 20.

Likewise, broader core curricular reforms were also part of In-stitution E’s downsizing of FYC. WPA-E noted that “as an institu-tion, [in the past 5–10 years] we probably have learned that … toengage students across their career and really solidify [communica-tion] skills that we initiate here in [our] department, we need tohave writing on the table elsewhere.” So, she said, the desire to de-centralize and diffuse writing, among other factors, has contributed

to the reduction of FYC requirements and the simultaneousincrease of CxC requirements, detailed below. It merits noting thatInstitution E also requires, beyond the core course requirements,10 courses in the humanities, more than any other institution in thisstudy.

While Institutions D and E reduced FYC, one institution hadmade similar steps in 2000. Widespread curricular reforms at Insti-tution B came in the late 1990s in part because of (regional accredi-tation body) North Central Association’s exhortation to create amore coherent general education curriculum and simultaneouslybecause of ABET’s shift to outcomes-based assessment. InstitutionB removed a three-course (quarter system) writing sequence to haveno FYC course requirement, but instituted a second-year coursefeaturing direct communication instruction and foregroundingwritten, oral, and visual performances. Thus, although some ontheir campus called for eliminating FYC in a remote echo of theculture-utility debate, WPA-B’s campus colleagues were ultimatelyconvinced that a core course with direct communication instructionwas necessary, and should be designed and administered by peoplewho know how to teach communication. Since that course focusesgenerally on civic advocacy, it satisfied both utilitarian and culturalaims. Also, other courses in their new core curriculum were writing-intensive or included writing.

Transforming FYC: At the same time that some institutionsreduced FYC requirements, others were transforming them. Oneof those transformations involved thematic content, which tendsto be fairly uniform in the initial iterations of a revised course, thenless so over time. In the case of Institution B’s second-year commu-nication course, the thematic focus on civic advocacy was initiallyconsistent across instructors. However, since then WPA-B said“that [advocacy] flavor has remained, but it has become a little bitmore … instructor dependent.” Today, the mostly-TA taughtcourse features mixtures of civic advocacy with environmentalissues, for instance, and others have moved away from the advocacytheme altogether to explore issues of communication, technology,and more.

Institution D has also seen a loosening of thematic uniformity inits first-year composition requirement, although over the course ofmore than 20 years. WPA-D noted that despite loosening from aonce-lockstep curriculum, significant coherence remains becausefaculty have identified some common readings that most effectivelyachieve the course objectives. Such loosening of uniformity has re-sulted in pedagogical innovation, with instructors proposing themesdealing with, for example, creativity, cross-cultural contact, andothers that can spark interdisciplinary research and experimentationamong faculty and students.

WPA-F indicated that their first-year course, with a thematicfocus on science, technology, and society, also began with fairly uni-form assignments and thematic content (faculty collaboratively com-piled their own reader) but has now become less homogeneous. Sheestimates that readings and assignments are now 75 percent consis-tent across sections but will likely become less consistent over time.In terms of HSS, EC 2000 does not mandate or even encouragestrict curricular uniformity or homogeneity. In fact, curricular het-erogeneity may be encouraged by the fact that EC 2000 outcomesare quite broad and that programs and institutions set their ownoutcomes and demonstrate how they achieved those.

Two of the program descriptions provided by the WritingAcross the Engineering Curriculum SIG members indicated that a

substantial percentage of their students tested out of taking FYC.Of those that required FYC of all students, one of the programsdescribed an FYC course that was not a composition course in thetraditional sense. Rather, this course’s thematic content focuses on“communication, design, human factors, and ethics.” The FYCcourse at our own institution is similarly non-traditional, providinginstruction in communication and environmental and professionalethics.

Innovation without FYC: While some institutions in this studywere downsizing or transforming their FYC requirements, twoother universities were innovating without FYC. WPA-A said thathis program’s mission and structure was shaped significantly by theabsence of a FYC requirement, which had been abandoned duringcurricular reforms initiated in the late 1960s. For the past 20 years,WPA-A was the only writing program faculty member on campus,until recently when a tenure-track communication center directorjoined the faculty. He said given such limited sources, he prefers tofocus his energies on making a few initiatives exemplary, “and toresist that tendency to get spread too thin.”

Hence, the absence of FYC has been primary in shaping hisprogram’s identity, and that (largely) one-person program’s ac-complishments have been many. For instance, WPA-A has cham-pioned writing embedded in the disciplines and held at least two orthree faculty development workshops annually, capitalizing on aproject-based curriculum that he encountered when he arrived inthe 1980s. These collaborations with technical faculty have led togrants, publications, and other innovations. He also helped developa peer tutoring program, now directed by his colleague, and devel-oped two majors and a minor in writing. Recent changes in cam-pus leadership have brought the issue of a FYC requirement intodiscussion, but WPA-A, true to his do-few-things-well philoso-phy, would prefer to remain focused on existing initiatives and notlaunch a FYC course.

Whereas Institution A had been without FYC for over 30 years,Institution C had never had a university-wide writing requirement.According to WPA-C, the absence of any required writing course“grows out of a long-standing tradition [at Institution C] that ‘realmen’ do numbers; they don’t write.… So, there’s just no traditionhere, and we’ve got to rectify that.” However, as explained below,the CxC idea on the horizon will likely not involve a requiredwriting course.

2) Multimodal Communication: Integrating Written, Oral, andVisual Communication: One of the most significant transformationsamong writing programs in this study involves a major redefinition asthose programs reconfigure themselves as communication programs.This shift could mean more “Writing” Program Administrators maysoon be adding “Communication” to their titles; already “Writing”Programs are becoming “Communication” Programs, and WACinitiatives are evolving or have evolved into CxC initiatives. In thisshift, we see that “Writing” instruction is widening to include not justwritten but also oral and visual communication as well. Four of the sixprograms either have integrated or are planning greater integrationof written, oral, and visual (WOV) communication, each in uniqueways. Many of these initiatives suggest a breakdown of a simplisticdivide between utility and culture, emphasizing instead communica-tion instruction across multiple contexts and purposes, and greateropportunities for innovation and collaboration.

Institution A offers tutorials through its campus communicationcenter on more than just writing, in a move that can be seen as

neither exclusively utilitarian or cultural, but both. Tutors workwith students on oral presentations, which can involve video-tapedpractices followed by a viewing and debriefing of the oral perfor-mance. WPA-A added that they would ultimately like to also offerresources for students on visual design, especially since he estimatedthat 70–75 percent of all Institution A students are engineering orscience majors. WPA-A has also designed and taught courses inprint/digital literacy and rhetoric and visual design. For him,ABET’s move “to outcome-based [assessment] rather than beancounting courses” and the lack of a definition of what it means to“communicate effectively” (EC 2000 Criterion 3g) allows forgreater innovation and for each campus to interpret and enactcommunication uniquely.

As noted previously, innovation at Institution B was also partial-ly catalyzed by accreditation forces; out of this exigency, which oc-curred simultaneously with ABET’s shift to outcomes-based as-sessment, came four core courses. One of those replaced, to somedegree, a traditional first-year composition course sequence. Of-fered in the second year, the new core course foregrounds WOVcommunications. The character and focus of that course emergedvia collaboration among humanities scholars with backgrounds incomposition and rhetoric, speech, and visual communication. Theformer WPA at Institution B indicated that the course “can becomea composition course in which oral and visual communication play asupportive role, or it can become a fuller, multimodal course, inwhich the three are supposed to be given equal weight.” The twomost significant challenges of teaching such a course, he said, are“finding the proper balance” of instruction in the three modes and“getting up to speed in whatever of the three you are least familiarwith.” Although originally taught by some faculty, that course todayis taught almost exclusively by graduate students. At Institution B,WPA-B estimated that three quarters of all students major in engi-neering or science.

Although the course is not required, WPA-C has also designedand taught a course that emphasizes visual and verbal argument. Hementioned an emerging CxC program in which the provisionalguidelines involve the goal of enhancing students’ abilities in writ-ten, oral, and visual communication. The WPA-C noted that themost intriguing development at Institution C in the last five yearsin terms of composition has been “increased attention to visualcommunication.” After estimating that 65 percent of Institution Cstudents major in engineering or science, he added that “every engi-neer has to make oral presentations, and they have to use graphs andtables and illustrations, and they are generally very expert withPower Point and very inept with the substance of what they put ontheir Power Point slides.” He said this recent “move from strictlywritten to oral and visual [communication]” has been akin to aKuhnian paradigm shift, “and we’re now working out the paradigm,and I expect us to be doing that for a while.” Like the WPAs atInstitutions A and B, he saw ABET’s move toward outcomes as apositive spur for curricular innovation. “[ABET is] moving awayfrom simply grades and courses to looking at performance, and oneof the kinds of performance that engineers have to be able to do is towrite and talk…so…ABET seems to be our friend right now.”

Although the triadic theme was not mentioned by the WPAsfrom Institutions D and E, the WPA at Institution F observed thatmany faculty find it challenging to enable engineering students tounderstand the role of visual elements and analogies in professionaland technical writing. An emphasis on integrating oral and written



communication has been part of her department’s curricular phi-losophy since its inception. Such an emphasis may stem from con-ceptualizing disciplinary writing as a means of fostering novicemembers’ entrance into their disciplines.

The growing interest in integrating visual, oral, and writtencommunication is also evident in several of the program descrip-tions provided by the members of the Writing Across the Engi-neering Curriculum SIG at The Conference on College Composi-tion and Communication in 2006. Of the seven programdescriptions that members provided (not including our own), fiveexplicitly mention written communication courses that integratevisual and/or oral communication. The triadic theme also surfacedbriefly during the SIG discussion as an area that needs more atten-tion in the scholarly community.

Our own institution is just now beginning to address growinginstructional demands in this area. Although oral, visual, and elec-tronic communications have been taught sporadically by instructorswith expertise in those areas, there has been little direct and consis-tent instruction in these areas in core courses. This situation isbeginning to change. We have hired a new faculty member withexpertise in teaching oral communication, and perhaps most im-portantly, we have just opened a new Communication Center, withthe objective of providing students with feedback on oral presenta-tion skills. The long-term goals of the center include developing vi-sual and electronic instructional resources. We will no doubt becontending for some time with how to best integrate these areas ofexpertise in our own FYC course and across the curriculum.Among others, programs at the forefront of WOVE (written, oral,visual and electronic) integration in engineering contexts includeIowa State, Georgia Tech, and Louisiana State (Burnett, 2008;ISUComm, 2006; Payne, Warnick, and Blakely-Duffelmeyer, 2006;Powell et al., 2008). Multimodal forms of communication are alsotopics of much recent research (e.g., Bezemer and Kress, 2008;Kress, 2007; Selfe, 2007; Hull and Nelson, 2005; Wysocki et al.,2004).

3) CxC Crests the Horizon: Making Communication Interdisci-plinary: Data from this study indicate that CxC programs are onthe rise. When most of the WPAs indicated their institutions hador did not have a formal, institutionalized CxC program, they weregenerally referring to the presence either of consistent faculty devel-opment workshops or of university-approved communication-intensive (CI) guidelines, or both, and most often CI guidelines. Atsome universities, strong support exists for such initiatives, andteams of HSS faculty are working with technical faculty to imple-ment them, which can entail opportunities to enact compromiseson the culture-utility divide. In other universities, it remains to beseen if CxC programs will receive the support needed to succeed, orif CxC will remain at the margins, a token nod to communicationinstruction. Of the six program directors interviewed, five of themindicated that their CxC programs were undergoing a kind of birthor rebirth, either on the near or not-too-distant horizon. In someinstances, the decline of FYC came in tandem with the rise of CxC,spurred by an initiative to decentralize and spread out writing.These broader, whole-curriculum foci took on multiple forms.

A more extensive CxC program is under discussion at InstitutionA, prompted largely by a new president, WPA-A noted. AlthoughCxC is already deeply ingrained in the project-based curriculum atInstitution A, the new president is interested in establishing formalCI guidelines. Even though this formal program is currently at the

concept stage, WPA-A said his discussions with the president andothers lead him to sense a movement towards a more institutional-ized CxC program in the near future.

Institution B’s WAC/CxC story has the potential to come fullcircle. Institution B was once well known for its strong WACprogram, and after the departure of prominent WAC leaders, theestablished WAC program sputtered briefly, then died, only now toexperience a possible rebirth. Renewed interest in CxC emanatesfrom faculty in select science and engineering departments, whowould like to see more disciplinary communication instruction forundergraduates. Such interest has invited collaborations in whichcomposition faculty have consulted with technical faculty on waysto meaningfully integrate communication into technical courses.When and whether that CxC phoenix will rise from the ashes willdepend in large part on whether a cadre of committed faculty cham-pions the CxC cause.

Like at Institution A, CxC is also cresting the horizon at Institu-tion C. Both administrators and faculty support such a move,WPA-C noted, with support from, among others, the associatedean for engineering and several senior, distinguished faculty inengineering. Although WPA-C suggested that faculty have longmaintained the status quo, a sea change has occurred. In the2005–06 academic year, a majority of voting faculty at Institution Capproved the idea of new CI requirements, which were being draft-ed at the time of the interview; these requirements will not involve asingle required course but will contain a set of currently evolving cri-teria that, if approved, all the CI courses would be required to meet.In a time of relative resource scarcity, the administration dedicatedfunds to hiring a new full-time faculty member to help lead this andother communication initiatives, starting in fall 2006. When askedto what factors he attributes this sea change, WPA-C noted facultydiscontent with the quality of student writing and added,

unusually for academia, I think it’s the contact withreality.… If all you want to do is write code, that job hasalready gone to India [or elsewhere]. So if our students areto be employed and to have successful careers, the … thingthat our graduates tell us is that it’s just overwhelminglyimportant to be able to communicate orally and in writing.There’s just no ambiguity about that.

Although Institution D had not heretofore institutionalizedCxC, ABET’s emphasis on outcomes and a resolution of theaforementioned tension between the engineering and humanitiesprograms’ differing perspectives regarding CI courses had led to arecent draft of CI guidelines. Implemented in fall 2006, the CIcriteria divide CI courses into two types. In “C1” courses, althoughdirect communication instruction may be limited in scope, com-munication is part of the course pedagogy, and assignments play asignificant role in the course workload and include regular peer andinstructor feedback with the opportunity to revise one or more ofthe assignments. By contrast, “C2” courses involve writing buthave little to no revision, and communication skills are not part ofthe course pedagogy. Of all required CI courses, at least 25 percentof them must be in the major.

Although no formal CxC program currently exists atInstitution E, WPA-E said that may soon change. At present twoscience programs and the humanities program are actively involvedin discipline-specific writing initiatives, but without central

coordination, oversight, or significant communication betweenprograms. The drivers for these CxC aspirations include the hu-manities program’s desire to see writing instruction spread acrossthe curriculum and technical faculty’s desire to see students doingmore discipline-specific writing. Such overlaps may lead to inter-disciplinary collaboration. Additional drivers include an upcomingregional accreditation visit, and WPA-E believes “that the devel-opment of a full-fledged Writing Across the Curriculum programwill be part of our initiatives for our next [accreditation] report.”Further, she noted the presence of a new Dean who holds signifi-cant interest in “the development of a true, centralized WACprogram.”

Although some faculty development has occurred, this remainsWPA-E’s most significant concern, and they are currently inter-viewing outside consultants to conduct CxC workshops and hopingfor funding support. “We have [some faculty] who are sure thatwriting is an important skill for students to develop, but they seethemselves as laboratory trained or research-oriented and just reluc-tant to work in areas where they feel ill-prepared.” Some technicalfaculty would also benefit from CxC workshops since they feel“pressure in departments like mathematics and physics to ensure atruly superlative preparation in the quantitative methods and thecontent,” and some instructors think attention devoted to anythingelse detracts from the delivery of technical content. Such instructorsare ideal candidates for CxC faculty seminars, which dispel suchcommon myths about incorporating writing in technical courses(Leydens and Santi, 2006).

At our own institution, we have found that our CxC programhas led to similar opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration.Our CI guidelines were approved by our undergraduate council in1999, and stipulated that each undergraduate degree-granting pro-gram would designate four CI courses, generally two in the juniorand two in the senior year. Faculty development workshops haveoccurred annually since 1998, and as of 2007 over 70 faculty mem-bers have participated, on a campus with just over 200 full-time fac-ulty; over 40 individual faculty have received pedagogical consulta-tions from CxC specialists. Further, several teaching collaborationshave ensued, including collaborative, interdisciplinary instructioninvolving CxC faculty and faculty in introductory design as well asin upper-division engineering and science courses. Further, severalresearch publications have emanated from these collaborations, in-volving faculty from Chemistry, Geological Engineering, ChemicalEngineering, and other disciplines.

IV. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Our inquiry began with questions about innovations in theteaching and learning of communication, mutually beneficial col-laborative opportunities, and how historical and contemporarycontexts inform present and future communication initiatives. Tobring together these issues, we focus below on collaborative oppor-tunities and challenges in communication initiatives, drawing fromhistorical and contemporary findings.

Implicitly or otherwise, EC 2000 encourages composition andtechnical faculty to destabilize the terms of the culture-utility de-bate. That is, if sufficient faculty resources and support are givens,EC 2000 encourages collaboration and innovation. Rather thanmandating that a required course happen in semester X and contain

curriculum Y, EC 2000 simply requires evidence that outcomeswere achieved, which can allow composition and engineering facul-ty to work together to forge new paths toward these outcomes. Thecaveat, of course, is that without resources, these programs and theirassociated collaborations may end up being merely symbolic. Giventhe above findings, meaningful collaborative work stands to bridgeculture-utility divides in the FYC, CxC, and interdisciplinary areas.The discussion of these three areas below highlights opportunitiesand challenges in moving from culture vs. utility to culture andutility. A summary of such opportunities and challenges in facultycollaborations appears in Table 3.

A. FYC: Opportunities and ChallengesComposition and engineering faculty should see any FYC ini-

tiative as an opportunity to collaborate. Although composition fac-ulty hold expertise in FYC theory and practice, engineering facultyshould have a voice in shaping FYC outcomes. For instance, in1997 at our institution, in the process of designing a new FYChybrid course (described above), we asked all faculty via their de-partment heads to tell us what students completing such a prepara-tory course should know and be able to do. When in their repliesseveral engineering colleagues underscored the importance ofknowing how to marshal data in support of knowledge claims, wedeliberately augmented the amount of course instruction on diversemeans of persuasion. This process also enabled us to identify facultymisconceptions about the nature, scope, and purposes of FYC,which we addressed in syllabi and in course approval documentspresented to our faculty undergraduate council.

However, in the more fluid post-EC 2000 context, some maysee new opportunities to decrease culture and bolster utility. Asnoted in the findings, FYC reductions occurred at three institu-tions. For some, these moves have overtones of the calls to eliminate“cultural courses” heard over a century ago by leading engineeringeducators, in most cases to make room for courses perceived as moreutilitarian. On the other hand, Institution A is considering adding anew FYC course after decades without one. In the long run, theeffects of such shifts will depend on whether any de-emphases onculture-and-utility FYC courses are accompanied by increasedemphasis on culture and utility elsewhere in the curriculum.

The FYC findings also intersect the culture-utility debate onthe issue of thematic diversity. WPA-B, D, and F noted in FYCcourses an increasing multiplicity of thematic foci, which could beinterpreted from a narrow utilitarian perspective as evidence of in-consistency or incoherence across sections of the same course. Sucha perspective may emanate from familiarity with the often prede-fined or fairly uniform content and concepts in many engineeringand science courses.

However, a broader cultural perspective could see such the-matic diversity as evidence of pedagogical, curricular, and/orinterdisciplinary innovation in response to evolving awareness ofhow students learn and evolving cultural understandings. From thatperspective, thematic diversity can augment faculty’s ability to ad-dress students’ multiple identities as engineers, citizens, and com-plex human beings. The challenge involves finding a workable bal-ance between thematic diversity that lacks even broad coherenceand rigid thematic conformity that stifles innovation. On thewhole, effective collaboration between composition and engineer-ing faculty on FYC outcomes will require a degree of trust so thatculture and utility concerns can be voiced and divergent perspectives



can be heard and negotiated based on the perceived best interests ofstudents and the constraints of faculty resources.

B. CxC: Opportunities and ChallengesWhile FYC was decreased at two institutions, one of the signs

that culture may not be marginalized in those (and other) engineer-ing curricula emanates from the fact that resources are being allocat-ed toward existing or burgeoning CxC initiatives. In fact, in five ofthe six cases, CxC programs are expanding, under construction, oron the horizon. However, the act of learning to be a more effectivecommunicator can involve diverse emphases on utility, culture, orboth. The emphasis depends on a CxC program’s larger implicitand explicit mission and goals, and how those are manifested in fac-ulty development workshops and in technical faculty’s willingnessand ability to meaningfully integrate nontechnical communicationconcepts in technical courses. On the one hand, a CxC programthat concentrates, for instance, on oral and written skill develop-ment per se may be described as primarily utilitarian. On the otherhand, a CxC program that focuses on communication as a methodof understanding and facilitating entrance into a discipline, learningportable critical thinking skills, and providing opportunities tomeaningfully integrate appropriate nontechnical components intechnical courses (and appropriate technical components in non-technical courses) will have a stronger cultural and utility emphasis.

However, as WPA-E warns, in an increasingly crowded engi-neering curriculum, many believe that “any attention to somethingelse [in technical core courses]—to writing, to context, [etc.]—istime taken away from this essential delivery of content that will dis-advantage our students.” Thus, the push toward utilitarian endsmay remain strong and disciplinary walls high. One sign of hopeexists for WPA-E in the collaboration among core course leaders,who have been able to agree on elements valued institution wide,

such as “opportunities for writing, along with opportunities forspeaking.” Collaboration between CxC directors and engineeringfaculty can also help dispel common misconceptions about CxC,such as the myth that all writing must be graded or that writing can-not foster learning of technical content (e.g., see Leydens and Santi,2006).

Certain dangers also exist in the shift of resources from FYC toCxC. Required courses obviously require resources, but in somesense, they are known quantities: one can roughly predict howmany sections need to be staffed, by how many faculty, and so on.They are a part of an institution’s infrastructure. CxC initiatives,on the other hand, are often much more diffuse, and as a result canbe vulnerable to resource and staffing cuts. When implemented ef-fectively, CxC initiatives can have excellent outcomes for studentsand faculty alike: they can represent the best of interdisciplinarycollaboration and teaching (Fulwiler and Young, 1990). Whendone poorly, however, they risk dilution, even disappearance, andthus must spend considerable resources in proving their worth, aproof not required to the same degree of most science and mathcourses.

Recent research points to a preparation gap in communication—many employers are finding engineering and applied science grad-uates underprepared for the demands of workplace communica-tion (Reave, 2004). If technical institutions make the choice toeliminate required writing courses and to underfund CxC pro-grams so that they disappear or become ineffectual (as in the caseof Institution B), the preparation gap will continue to widen.Underfunded communication initiatives can take a number offorms, such as communication courses and CxC programs thatare understaffed.

Narratives in our study indicate the importance of the “CxCChampion,” a tenure-track or tenured faculty member or team of

Table 3. Summary of collaborative opportunities and challenges in three curricular areas for composition/communication faculty andengineering/technical faculty.

such faculty who oversee CxC initiatives. Such teams provide anideal venue for collaboration between composition and engineeringfaculty, if both are committed to graduating—and negotiating theirdefinitions of—effective communicators.

CxC comes with other vulnerabilities and opportunities. Tech-nical faculty often say they feel initially underprepared to integratecommunication into their own disciplinary courses, even thoughthey may have a strong (albeit tacit) knowledge of how to write fortheir own discipline. Although they may support increased commu-nication instruction, many are unsure of how to proceed. Again,such circumstances call for collaboration between composition andtechnical faculty, wherein the former help render explicit the tacitwriting knowledge of the latter faculty.

One of our colleagues, after years of being referred to by tech-nical faculty as “the writing expert,” has devised a clever methodfor transcending the artificial writing-content dichotomy. With astraight face, she tells disciplinary faculty that her status as “writ-ing expert” qualities her to be the executive editor of their fields’most prestigious journals. As expected, they object based on herlack of content knowledge, so she replies by saying that writingexperts can judge good writing. And good writing is good writingin any discipline, she feigns. This discussion inevitably helps un-veil the point that each discipline has similar yet different stan-dards for evaluating not just its own disciplinary content but alsodiscourse knowledge. That is, each discipline constitutes its owndiscourse community. As a scholar of engineering communicationnotes, “The concept of a discourse community implies that shareduse of language is reciprocally related to membership in groups.One has to use language as others do in order to be accepted as agroup member, and one has to think like a group member in orderto use language as the group does” (Winsor, 1996, p. 9). So ourcolleague is ultimately conveying three critical points: (a) thatcomposition faculty cannot possibly hold thorough discourseknowledge in all disciplines, (b) that disciplinary faculty hold sig-nificant (often tacit) knowledge about standards for disciplinaryknowledge dissemination, and (c) that the learning of disciplinarycommunication and content are integrated processes. Moreover,solid awareness of these three points generally emerges only viafocused, collaborative dialogue among composition specialists andtechnical faculty.

Our research and examination of our own institution have pointedto four common models for integrating writing into the disciplines,and we list those here in terms of the degree to which they stand tofoster independence of disciplinary faculty. The models also appearin the order in which we think students in a given discipline aremost likely to conceptualize disciplinary writing as integral to beingeffective, efficient, contributing members of their field:

1) Disciplinary writing and communication instruction isintegrated into technical courses, whose technical instructorshave participated in CxC seminars and have ongoing accessto CxC resources.

2) Collaborative teaching involving composition and technicalfaculty in technical courses, wherein the composition facultymember has input into course communication goals andopportunities for direct communication instruction. Thismodel can also serve as a temporary scaffold toward thefirst model.

3) Linked courses, wherein composition and technicalfaculty purposefully align their courses so as to maximizebenefit for students in both courses. For instance, studentsin Senior Design may be simultaneously enrolled in atechnical communication course in which they learn therhetorical and communicative nuances of writing designreports and related genres.

4) Stand alone, upper-division technical communicationcourses taught by composition or technical communicationfaculty, with input from technical faculty on learning goalsand objectives.

All four models can foster collaboration between compositionand engineering faculty, and particularly the first three. Eachmodel clearly has advantages and disadvantages, and local re-sources and philosophies undoubtedly shape the model(s) thatwork most effectively. This list of collaborative opportunities doesnot imply a devaluation of stand-alone writing courses, which bothauthors teach and which serve multiple other important functions,such as examining case studies, engaging in situated, authenticwriting, and teaching technical students to communicate acrossdisciplines, with the public, and with other nontechnical audi-ences. Rather, the list merely highlights diverse levels of writingownership among disciplinary faculty.

Although a full treatment of those advantages and disadvantagesis beyond the scope of this article, technical faculty involved inmodels 1–3 may be justifiably concerned that their work in CxCcollaborations will not count for tenure and promotion, and maychoose to invest their energies in disciplinary areas in which theirwork is clearly rewarded. In other words, the adoption of CxC ini-tiatives requires not only faculty buy-in from across the disciplines,but also faculty development and a renewed vision of what countsfor promotion and tenure. WPA-A’s concern about a burgeoning,formalized CxC initiative was adopting “a writing-intensive re-quirement without an adequate infrastructure for faculty develop-ment, and not just that kind of entry-level workshop or two, but on-going support and oversight.” This concern was echoed by multipleWPAs interviewed in this study. As institutional priorities shift,promotion and tenure guidelines should reflect those priorities, an-other reason CxC needs assertive advocates from across campus.

C. Interdisciplinarity: Opportunities and Challenges Additional evidence exists to suggest that EC 2000 has con-

tributed to opening new opportunities for interdisciplinary collabora-tion and to placing greater emphases on communication within engi-neering education. Among the results of an ABET-commissionedmultiyear study of the effects of changes associated with EC 2000 isan increased emphasis on verbal communication and technicalwriting, as reported by program chairs; of those chairs, 78 percentreported either some or significant increases in emphasis over aten-year period in verbal communication in their programs, and83 percent reported some or significant increases in technical writing(Prados, Peterson, and Lattuca, 2005). Like EC 2000, interdiscipli-narity stands to break down or at least not explicitly reinforce oldboundaries between first and second stems, technical and nontech-nical, soft and hard skills.

Behind what we communicate is why we communicate it in aparticular way, so FYC, WOV, and CxC can foster the unveiling


of diverse disciplinary values and ways of knowing and communi-cating. When students understand those features of their and otherdisciplines, they are bound to possess a wider array of critical think-ing and approaches to problem conceptualization and solving.Such understandings will facilitate the ability to communicate notonly with other engineers, but with non-engineers and the generalpublic.

In many cases in this study, interdisciplinary collaboration be-tween technical and composition faculties addresses both cultureand utility interests. Well-designed interdisciplinary courses involv-ing multiple dimensions of writing and ethics or civic participationnot only make good sense for human beings and global citizens, butalso make for better future engineers and scientists. The increase inWOV instruction across the curriculum can help people becomemore visually and electronically literate, but also better workforcecommunicators. And CxC initiatives encourage faculty from differ-ent disciplines to teach and publish together, which could createnew models for learning as well as educate students and facultyabout how to communicate within and across disciplines. It wouldseem that interdisciplinarity in the ideal could serve as a form oftranscending divisiveness and identifying means of mutually benefi-cial partnerships with those once entrenched on either side of theculture-utility debate.

However, the culture-utility debate informs interdisciplinaryaims in other ways. As noted above, culture may be most vulnerablein an environment typified by competition for resources and credithours. It is possible that the new outcomes-based accreditationpractices will leave room for interdisciplinary cross-fertilization, ablurring of culture and utility in meaningful ways. Yet it is also pos-sible that it may exacerbate this divide. One possible outcome of themove toward outcomes and away from “bean-counting,” for exam-ple, is what we call the “kitchen-sink effect.” This entails an FYC orHSS course (or courses) that somehow strive to meet too manyABET outcomes, because they do not occur elsewhere in the tech-nical curriculum. What results is an unwieldy course with multiple,complex and somewhat disparate objectives that include everythingbut the kitchen sink. Such a course is made more problematic as itmay be staffed largely by faculty with experience teaching writingbut not the subject areas at hand (e.g., science and technology stud-ies, ethics, or visual and oral communication).

Signs of courses that were struggling with this “kitchen sink”effect appeared in this study, and we also know first-hand how thenew ABET accreditation practices can lead to this effect. In theyears following the shift to outcomes-assessment, we felt the needto defend our first-year writing and humanities course to facultywho may have felt those credits were “up for grabs” in the post-bean-counting world. As a result, objectives for the course werecarefully mapped onto certain aspects of Criterion 3, themselvesbroadly stated, in an effort to justify the course’s existence. As of thiswriting, the course organizers are dealing with the aftermath ofthat mapping, which has led to some thematic incoherence. Al-though not dire, the concern exists that we are on a path towardwhat one scholar calls “multidisciplinary illiteracy,” where our stu-dents will have a little understanding of everything and thoroughunderstanding of nothing (Soule and Press, 1998). As a facultyteam, we are continually grappling with our need to teach thecourse according to our areas of expertise in HSS, and the need tojustify the course within EC2000 and our institution’s scope andmission.

One other related danger of EC 2000 is that Criterion 3 f–jcould be outsourced exclusively to HSS and composition faculty,wherein curriculum designers merely apportion the less technicaloutcomes to non-engineering courses, and engineering coursesfocus exclusively on the more technical outcomes. The logic of sucha decision is that each faculty group can teach to their respective dis-ciplinary strengths. Doing so, however, misses the opportunity formeaningful interdisciplinary collaboration wherein faculty and stu-dents work across the culture-utility divide; it also falsely suggeststhat technical objectives can or should be divorced from non-technical ones, obscuring the interrelations between the two. More-over, doing so would lose the vision of simultaneously educating anengineer, a citizen, and a human being at multiple junctures in thecurriculum. Engineering students would leave their undergraduateeducations convinced that their engineering instructors, unlike theirHSS instructors, had little to no interest in or concern with issues ofethics, communication, the broader contexts impacted by engineer-ing solutions, life-long learning, and contemporary issues. Further,they would leave thinking their HSS instructors had little to no in-terest in students’ technical abilities and capabilities. Both of thesemiss the interdisciplinary vision and opportunity implicit in EC2000.

We recognize the inherent complexity involved in faculty collab-oration, particularly across disciplinary lines. Trust building andpower sharing are complicated in part by differing pedagogical andepistemological perspectives. However, we have accentuated oppor-tunities that aim toward fruitful dialogue based on mutual respect fordisciplinary content knowledge, ways of seeing and knowing.

As one historian suggests, it is entirely possible that the cyclicalfluctuations of composition programs between utilitarian andbroader cultural aims may stem from institutional missions. “Theways in which technical schools evolved formal structures forteaching students the written conventions of their disciplines revealthe familiar conflicts between the universities’ diverse missions:preservation of traditions (culture), creation of new knowledge(research), and utilitarian service” (Russell, 2002, p. 119). Theseconflicts could also be seen as part of a broader debate about disci-plines and the future of interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity,paradoxically, requires simultaneous investment in the disciplinesand in challenging those disciplines, overcoming disciplinaryboundaries. If they are to move forward, universities will have tounderstand this paradox, and create structures of support andreward for interdisciplinary work.

V. LIMITATIONS AND AREAS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

Like any study, ours has limitations. First, its design means thatwe have showcased a single perspective at each institution, and thisinvites the possibility of hero narratives, ones that only accentuatethe positive contributions of WPAs and their programs and do notreveal other, possibly competing, perspectives. Further, this studyfocuses on six institutions and was not intended to be representativeof all STEM-focused institutions. Also, although we focused on ithere, accreditation is only one of many drivers in a complex set ofinfluences on culture and utility and in the trend toward interdisci-plinarity. Institutional role and mission, departmental objectives,faculty talents and collaborative capabilities (it is no secret somefaculty do not play well with others), budgetary realities, and other


stakeholder needs, to name a few, all shape HSS and compositioncurricula. We opened this article with statements from formerSPEE presidents, citing the crowded engineering curriculum as areason to eliminate or reduce HSS requirements. That crowding ismuch more intense today.

Yet that challenge may drive innovation in new ways. Unlikeother professions such as law and medicine, engineering has,despite over a century of calls to the contrary, remained “the onlyprofession where the entry level is achieved with a four-year under-graduate degree,” exacting on the discipline’s tremendous curricu-lar pressure. Hence, whereas a lawyer or doctor may have had a richliberal education as an undergraduate, the same is less likely to bethe case for engineers (Schachterle, 2004, p. 14). Like its prede-cessors, a report published by ASEE in 1966, which again calledfor engineering education to be a five-year program with a pre-professional degree to be given at the end of four years, had noeffect on curricula (Gianniny, 2004, p. 338). Engineering has retainedthe structure of liberal arts degrees despite the calls to move towardmodels common in other professions, calls heard today by theNational Academy of Engineering in their vision of the Engineer of2020 (National Academy of Engineering, 2004, 2005), the formerpresident and engineering dean of the University of Michigan atAnn Arbor (Duderstadt, 2008), and others.

We concur with Schachterle (2004) that ultimately the debateover utilitarian vs. broader aims presents a false dichotomy and adilemma that EC 2000 should ideally encourage us to overcome.

Engineering education will not be well served if the liberalarts faculty or the engineering faculty assume exclusiveownership of any of these accreditation goals. The wholefabric of engineering education will be significantlystrengthened if everyone engaged in creating this warp andweft works together to assure each of these eleven outcomes.Only if science and engineering faculty encourage studentsto work in teams, to frame technical issues withinglobal/societal contexts, and to communicate clearly willstudents take such goals seriously. Similarly, if humanitiesand social science faculty fail to understand the importanceof experimentation, mathematical modeling, andengineering design as fundamental human creative andintellectual activities, it is unlikely that students will takethem seriously or reap the full benefits of what the entireinstitution has to offer (pp. 30-31).

Schachterle posits that “it is neither necessary nor desirable tobe forced to choose between utilitarian-vocational or culturally en-riching, self-reflective justifications for HSS.” Rather, he goes onto advocate a “complementary school of thought” that draws fromthe strengths within engineering and the liberal arts (Schachterle,2004, p. 32). How to achieve these ends given institutional goalsand missions and the current state of engineering education re-mains a significant practical and research challenge.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank the six composition programdirectors for selflessly lending their time and insight to this study.Further, we would like to acknowledge colleagues who reviewed the

manuscript and provided valuable suggestions, including the JEEeditor, associate editor, and anonymous reviewers.

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AUTHORS’ BIOGRAPHIES

Jon A. Leydens is an associate professor and Writing ProgramAdministrator at the Colorado School of Mines (CSM), where hehas been since 1997. He has taught at the college level since 1989.He currently serves as the chair of the CSM Writing Across theCurriculum Committee. In addition to writing across the curricu-lum, his research interests include teaching, learning, sustainablecommunity development, and social justice issues. Besides a gradu-ate course in academic publishing, he teaches courses in writing andrhetoric to undergraduates.

Address: Liberal Arts and International Studies Division,Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, 80401; telephone: (�1)303.273.3180; fax: (�1) 303.273.3751; e-mail: [email protected].

Jen Schneider is an assistant professor in Liberal Arts and Inter-national Studies at the Colorado School of Mines, where her workfocuses on media studies and communication. She teaches coursesin science, environmental and risk communication, and in film stud-ies. Her research interests are in popular representations of climatechange and in communicating risks of emerging technologies andenvironmental crisis. She also does work in engineering, sustainablecommunity development, and social justice. She is managing editorof the new journal Engineering Studies.

Address: Liberal Arts and International Studies Division,Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, 80401; telephone: (�1)303.273.3628; fax: (�1) 303.273.3751; e-mail: [email protected].


APPENDIX: INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

1) I’d like to know more about your composition/writingprogram in general.

2) Help me understand more about [a-f below] of yourcomposition/writing program?a. First Year Compositionb. Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing In the Disciplines c. Required Technical Communication Courses d. Writing Centere. Anything beyond required Tech. Comm. course(s);

other courses or initiatives (e.g., labs, online materials,etc.)

f. Any other aspect of your program you’d like to discuss

Note: For question 2, inquire about primary changes in theseareas in the past 5–10 years and primary drivers of those changes.

3) Briefly describe your Writing Program leadership roles andresponsibilities. Who does what? What works well? Whatchallenges and opportunities are presented? How do youaddress these challenges? Opportunities?

4) How does your WP mission fit into larger frameworks:Connections with other programs on your campus? Yourschool’s mission? Connections with ABET? Connections toother accreditation bodies, if applicable?


Documents

Innovations in Composition Programs that Educate … · interview data, and particularly ... neering education, ... to more fully understand the catalysts for curricular innovation