“Developing Curriculum for a Multi-Course Interdepartmental Learning Community to Promote Retention and Learning for Underprepared Engineering Students”
by Rachel A. Milloy, Matthew Moberly, and Rebecca Powell | Xchanges 9.1
Dependent Learners Become Active Participants
Unit 1: Application to a Research Track
When we meet our ILC students, we ask them why they want to become engineers. Many students admit that they chose engineering because they know an engineer, because someone said they should become an engineer, or because engineers earn higher-paying salaries. They are less familiar with the kind of work engineers actually do and how writing functions as an important part of an engineer’s job. To acquaint students with the work and concerns of engineers, students complete their first assignment, an Application to a Research Track Memo (Unit 1). For this assignment, students choose one of the following engineering challenges to explore during the semester: expanding world population, pollution, energy, transportation, infrastructure, or aerospace. After selecting a challenge, students investigate the issue by rhetorically analyzing an argument about a facet of the challenge (Unit 2), interview a specialist and design a website about the kinds of writing engineers do (Unit 3), and finally, write a Documented Argument Essay concerning one aspect of the challenge (Unit 4).
In addition to Unit 1 serving as the foundation for the other learning units, the Application to a Research Track Memo assignment encourages students to explore engineering-specific discourse communities to which they hope to belong. Reading assignments aid students in better understanding how writing, rhetoric, and engineering intersect and how engineers use writing through various genres to “routinely communicate their discoveries and progress to peers, managers, other engineers, and the community” (Oakes, Leone, and Gunn 363). During Unit 1, students are dependent on the instructor to introduce them to important course terms and concepts and to lead them through the reading assignments with task-specific instructions; however, students participate actively in their own learning by selecting an engineering challenge based on their own interests. In addition, they begin to develop community with peers by working with others in their research tracks, and they develop a sense of pre-professional identity as an “engineer in training.” Once choosing a research track to explore, students become more invested in the course: they begin to see writing as a way to investigate topics that interest them and that apply to their lives as college students and future professionals.