Engineering Sentences: A Cross-Disciplinary Training Program

Cohort
2020
Fellow(s)
Initiative Type
program
Initiative Theme
Curriculum Redesign
Skill-Building
Audience
Faculty/Instructors
UT Austin Undergraduates
Project Focus
Improving Teaching and Learning
Institutional Resource

Although Cockrell School of Engineering (CSE) undergraduates take a required engineering writing class, which I teach for Chemical Engineering, they typically struggle with writing laboratory and long-form research reports. Helping CSE students to overcome this obstacle matters because writing technical reports prepares engineering students for the writing-intensive work of a professional engineer. Faculty teaching these classes would also benefit from higher quality student work. Meanwhile, UT’s University Writing Center (UWC) offers one-on-one consultations, and group workshops to 40,804 undergraduate and 11,028 graduate students. However, most UWC Consultants are students from Humanities disciplines, and they have little prior experience with science and engineering writing genres. Consequently, they have felt under-prepared to assist CSE students with technical reports, and relatively few CSE students seek their help. Teaching technical writing to these consultants will support both their current work and future job prospects. The UWC is also trying to encourage CSE undergraduates to train and work as Consultants. So far, only a few have done so, or signed up to do so. Underlying the problem is an old cultural divide between STEM and Humanities/Social Science disciplines. For the Humanities-trained Consultants, I hypothesize that the training and experience will expand their knowledge of writing genres and scope of expertise. My experience working with Engineering Undergraduates has shown me that they enjoy expanding their range of expertise, particularly when they can contribute to a new enterprise. So, I expect that encouraging Engineering undergraduates to work with the UWC will begin to break down this cultural divide. For other CSE students, I expect that early, positive experiences working with the Consultants will encourage them to seek UWC assistance more often and improve their writing.

 

 

Explore the resources available at the University Writing Center for additional support and tools to enhance writing skills:
UWC Resources

Learn about the Consultant Certification program, which offers training to UWC Consultants to improve their ability to assist students, particularly in technical writing:
Consultant Certification Information

Impacts from This Initiative

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Bridging Rhetoric and Engineering presentation and paper

Date
Fellow(s)

“Bridging Rhetoric and Engineering: Qualitative Results from a Writing Center Program to Improve Engineering Undergraduate Writing,” Proceedings from IEEE ProComm, 2024. Pittsburgh, PA (July 14-17, 2024). I delivered this co-authored conference paper at the IEEE ProComm conference. See the link for the paper.

 

View the presentation slides here

For more information, you can access the article with the DOI: 10.1109/ProComm61427.2024.00034.

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Engineering Sentences through the Texas Snowpocalypse: Results of a collaboration between a University Writing Center and an Engineering Writing Course (CCCC)

Date
Fellow(s)

D'Arcy Randall gave a co-authored presentation about the program developed as part of her PTF Initiative at the Conference on College Composition and Communication on February 16, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois, themed "Doing Hope in Desperate Times." The presentation was part of a session featuring Writing Centers titled "Cross-Disciplinary Collaborations to Promote Transfer and Self-Efficacy," which was among hundreds of sessions of varied topics, formats, and scholarly approaches for over 1000 attendees. 

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Engineering Sentences at a Writing Center: A Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration (College Composition and Communication Regional Conference)

Date
Fellow(s)

D'Arcy Randall gave a virtual presentation about the pilot program developed as part of her PTF Initiative at the College Composition and Communication Regional Conference at the University of Southern California on Dec. 19, 2020.

Writing Center logo

University Writing Center Resources

Date
Fellow(s)

D'Arcy Randall's PTF Initiative created a collaboration between the Cockrell School of Engineering and The University Writing Center to create resources and consultant trainings to better support STEM students in technical writing projects and assignments. As a result of the Initiative's work and findings, a number of STEM-specific UWC resources have been created and/or revised, which can be found on the UWC website.