A Collaborative Longitudinal Design for Supporting Writing Pedagogies of STEM Faculty

ABSTRACT

Providing contextualized, effective writing instruction for engineering students is an important and challenging objective. This article presents a needs analysis conducted in a large engineering college and introduces the faculty development program that was created based on that analysis. The authors advocate for sustained interdisciplinary collaboration to promote contextualized adoption and adaptation of best practices and testing of scalable strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Engineering communication
• survey research
• programmatic research

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the faculty who participated in surveys and interviews for this work. This project was reviewed and approved by our Institutional Review Board and was conducted in keeping with relevant human subjects research requirements. We would like to thank Rebecca Walton and the two anonymous reviewers for their feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We use STEM to denote science and engineering faculty.

2. While our project was funded by the College of Engineering, our initial cohort had associated faculty from other colleges, including atmospheric and environmental sciences.

3. Joseph Harris (1989, pp. 12–15) and Prior (1998, pp. 3–32) have offered extended critiques of discourse community theory.

4. These challenges include infrastructure and culture, knowledge and skills of effective teaching practices, student experience category, time, classroom and curriculum, personal disposition, networking and community, and alignment with expectancy value theory (Finelli et al., 2014, pp. 339–342).

Additional information

Funding

We thank the Strategic Instructional Innovations Program from the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign for funding this project through its initial 3 years.

Notes on contributors

John R. Gallagher

All coauthors are affiliated with the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

John R. Gallagher is an assistant professor of English, specializing in digital rhetoric, interfaces, participatory audience theory, and technical communication.

Nicole Turnipseed

Nicole Turnipseed is a PhD student in Writing Studies with an interest in holistic literate development across contexts, disciplines, and lives.

John Y. Yoritomo

John Y. Yoritomo is a Ph.D. candidate in the physics department.

Celia M. Elliott

Celia M. Elliott is a science writer, technical editor, and research administrator in the Department of Physics.

S. Lance Cooper

S. Lance Cooper is a condensed matter physicist and Associate Head for Graduate Programs in the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Cooper co-teaches (with Celia Elliott) a graduate-level technical writing course, “Communicating Physics Research,” to physics and engineering graduate students.

John S. Popovics

John S. Popovics is a professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering department at the University of Illinois.

Paul Prior

Paul Prior (Professor, English; Director, Center for Writing Studies) researches literate activity, semiotic practice, and disciplinarity.

Julie L. Zilles

Julie L. Zilles is a Research Assistant Professor in Crop Sciences, with research interests in microbiology, water, and writing.