A New Role for Technical Communication in the Engineering Curriculum
A. Berndt
Senior Instructor
The University of British Columbia
Vancouver, Canada ayberndt@apsc.ubc.ca
Conference Topic: Engineering Education
Keywords: Community Service-Learning, Engineering Ethics, Global Engineering, Technical
Communication
INTRODUCTION
As university classes become larger in a climate of economic austerity, the call for “highengagement, high-impact” [2] activities becomes louder. Faculty members in every discipline are encouraged to develop personalized experiential learning opportunities for their students in order to offset the impact of fiscal restraint in their classrooms. Many engineering educators in North America are looking to Community Service-Learning (CSL) as a possibility [3].
This paper explores a possible new role for technical communication courses in the engineering curriculum—a role influenced by a larger social context of economic, pedagogical, and ethical drivers. How these drivers can be re-framed in broader terms of global engineering within a required technical communication course is exemplified by a
Reading Week (Spring Break) CSL project in Applied Science 201 (APSC 201: Technical
Communication) at The University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
1 CONTEXTS OF THE COURSE
1.1
Industry Expectations
At the University of British Columbia, Applied Science 201 is a regular three-credit course for engineering students in all disciplines: enrollment is between 30-35 students per section, with approximately 28 sections per academic year. As industry expectations influence graduation criteria in North America, APSC 201 has been a required course since its inception
15 years ago. For instance, the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) and the
Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) stipulate that engineering graduates demonstrate an ability to communicate effectively in Criterion 3(g). Related social competencies and skills in Criterion 3 are outlined below [4]:

(c) an ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs within realistic constraints such as economic, environmental, social, political, ethical, health and safety, manufacturability, and sustainability
(d) an ability to function on multidisciplinary teams
(f) an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility
(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.
1.2 Core Assignments
To meet industry expectations and accreditation requirements, students must pass a technical communication course to register in their fourth year of the Bachelor of Applied Science programme in Engineering at the University of British Columbia. Due to the mandatory nature of such a core course, APSC 201 is highly standardized, with the same syllabus, the same textbook, and the same assignments and exams across all sections. With several practice assignments and 12 marked assignments, the course introduces engineering students of all disciplines to several aspects of technical and professional communication. Students write proposals, formal reports, mechanism descriptions, instruction sets, and business correspondence, such as letters and memoranda, in response to socially contextualized case studies. Students also practice their oral skills by giving short impromptu presentations for various assignments and delivering team presentations of their formal reports.
In the January-April 2012 term, 60% of the students in one section of the course opted to participate in an experiential learning project over Reading Week (Spring Break). The preproject assignment involved writing a team proposal that incorporated their expectations of the project. The post-project assignment involved writing a team report that incorporated critical reflection on their actual experiences of the project, which involved mentoring elementary school children in various science projects at inner-city schools in East
Vancouver. In completing these two assignments, they demonstrated how the criterion to
“communicate effectively” can be linked to the larger social criteria listed above. In contrast, the regular non-CSL stream of student teams wrote a team proposal and a team formal report on a technical product or service of their choice that related to their discipline.
2 ECONOMIC DRIVERS
2.1 Macro-Influences: Global Engineering
In 2004, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) released a report entitled The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century that outlined the need for a new generation of engineers capable of coping with the new global challenges in the 21 st century.
Although focused on the U.S., the authors of the report present scenarios of a new global world in which India and China play significant roles:
The coming era will be characterized by rapid population growth, which will contain internal dynamics that affect the types of problems engineers will face as well as world stability. Growth will be concentrated in less developed countries where a “youth bulge” will occur, while in advanced countries the population will age. Issues related to quality of life in some countries will be contrasted with more basic problems like access to water and housing in others... The economy in which we will work will be strongly influenced by the global marketplace for engineering services, a growing need for

interdisciplinary and system-based approaches, demands for customerization, and an increasingly diverse talent pool [5].
To cultivate a “diverse talent pool,” many engineering educators call for curriculum reform away from “cookbook” lab courses toward socially contextualized programmes. In The 21 st -
Century Engineer: A Proposal for Engineering Education Reform, Patricia Galloway suggests that engineers have historically carried out decisions made by others: by politicians, lawyers, and business leaders. Rarely do engineers themselves become politicians and take ownership of larger sociocultural decision-making roles [6]. David Douglas and Greg Papadopoulos begin their book by addressing engineering students directly: “while you were busy debugging… [w]e’ve entered a new era of engineering that is fundamentally changing the role of the engineer on the job and the engineer’s relationship to society” [7]. With the advent of the “Citizen Engineer,” we now witness engineering students joining the discussion on global citizenship and thinking about engineering as service to humanity.
Over the past decade, co-curricular organizations (many of them student-driven) throughout the English-speaking world have been leading grassroots initiatives to “socialize” engineering programmes to serve “the bottom of the pyramid” – a term first coined by former U.S.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 that refers to the lowest socioeconomic classes [8].
Organizations such as Engineers Against Poverty in the U.K., Engineers for Social Justice and
Peace in Australia, Engineers for a Sustainable World throughout the world, and Engineers
Without Borders in Canada and elsewhere have successfully influenced deans and department heads of engineering programmes to re-position existing engineering courses in relation to the
“developing world” or the “Global South.” Courses on global engineering, engineering and social justice, engineering as service, etc. are beginning to emerge within the bounds of traditional curricula.
2.2 Micro-Influences: “Engineers Within Borders”
Although an outward push toward global issues is palpable in engineering programmes throughout the English-speaking world, an inward pull toward national agendas is also evident, reinforcing the idea of “engineers within borders.” This has the potential to create a productive macro-micro tension that can work well for curriculum revitalization with a mandate to foster “glocal engineers.” For instance, the National Academy of Engineering is decidedly U.S.-focused, aiming to provide American engineering students with a globally oriented “competitive edge” that adds value to a traditional engineering education. In 2005,
Shuman, for instance, pointed out that
[a]fter ten years, these same drivers—rapidly changing technology, particularly information technology, corporate downsizing, outsourcing, and globalization—that provided the impetus for the professional skills are, if anything, even more critical today. This is especially true as industry views an increasingly larger portion of the science and engineering labor pool more like a commodity than a profession… Hence, a new issue confronting engineering educators today is how to best ensure that our graduates will continue to bring value to a marketplace in which their salary demands are three to five times greater than their international competitors… what is also needed is an understanding of how the growing social consciousness around the world is making it imperative that engineering students understand the implications of their work. [9]
Further literature reveals a preoccupation with a national numbers race in the global economy.
NAE President Charles Vest sounds the alarm by stating that “across Asia more than 21

percent of the students are graduating in engineering fields. Across Europe, just under 12 percent of recent graduates are engineers. In the U.S.? 4.5 percent. We are at the bottom of the list in this metric” [10]. In their 2008 study, Gereffi et al base the premise of their argument on the economic growth rates of China and India. Suggesting that China is “the factory of the world” while India is the “back office of the world,” they examine how China and India are outpacing the United States in their graduation of engineers. However, they not only describe “who” an engineer is but also “what” engineering is becoming [11].
3 PEDAGOGICAL DRIVERS
In light of the changing role of engineers and the resulting need for curriculum reform, “chalk and talk” methodologies are being replaced with new experience-based approaches that incorporate critical reflection, as first proposed by David Kolb [12]. No longer is it good enough for the professor to play the role of the “sage on the stage” with all the answers that students absorb and reproduce. Students are now increasingly expected to actively and explicitly draw upon their own prior learning experiences, both formal and informal, and to see the world around them as opportunity and resource in problem-solving.
3.1 Problem-Based Learning
First implemented in the Canadian medical school curriculum at McMaster University in the
1960s, Problem-Based Learning (PBL) has become a popular method of engaging students in complex situations [13]. Its overall success in prompting students to think “outside the box” has led to its adoption by disciplines beyond medicine. The applied sciences in general and engineering in particular are prime examples of disciplinary areas in which problem-solving is at the heart of learning, making PBL an ideal pedagogical approach, especially to authentic interdisciplinary problems.
3.2 Community Service-Learning
While some problems may be more social than technical, Community Service-Learning
(CSL) takes PBL further by situating an authentic problem, often unnamed, in the context of a local community. The Canadian Association for Community Service-Learning defines
Community Service-Learning (CSL) as a form of experiential education that integrates service in the community with academic courses and/or extra-curricular programs… CSL encourages thinking that directly connects the students’ experiences in the community with their academic learning and/or personal development. Through their CSL experiences, participants develop new understandings of their roles as citizens and build their capacity to actively engage in their communities. [14]
APSC 201 students in the CSL stream were given a choice of four elementary schools, ages/grades, and projects. Projects included mentoring elementary school students for science fairs, assisting the teacher in basic physics and math lessons with demonstrations they designed themselves, etc. For instance, one team introduced elementary school students to the engineering design cycle by building structures using spaghetti sticks and marshmallows and testing their structural integrity with fans. Another team enhanced geology lessons by melting crayons to illustrate the rock formation cycle, etc.
As later described in their formal reports, over half of the Engineering students who chose a
CSL project experienced a re-orientation of their role, with some moving from initial impressions of being “helpers” to questioning their identity as “citizen engineers.”
4 ETHICAL DRIVERS

The idea of a “citizen engineer” with a mandate to serve humanity is underscored by the codes of ethics tied to various professional engineering associations. To promote an early sense of professional identity among engineering students, tuition fees at the University of
British Columbia include dues for the Membership Advantage Program for Students (MAPS) in the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists (APEGBC), the licensing body for the professional designation, P. Eng. (Professional Engineer). Students are made aware that its code of ethics is binding.
4.1 APEGBC Code of Ethics
At the beginning of APSC 201, students are introduced to the APEGBC Code of Ethics with illustrations of how important effective communication is to the professional practice of engineering. The focus on public safety and sustainability is highlighted and attention is also drawn to issues of plagiarism both in the classroom and in the workplace through examination of Principle #7. Students opting for the CSL projects were also required to consider Principle
#10 as they prepared themselves for their role as mentors, which states that engineers are obligated “to extend public knowledge and appreciation of engineering and geoscience and protect the profession from misrepresentation and misunderstanding” [15].
4.2 Industry Codes of Ethics: ASCE, ASME, and IEEE
Students were asked to research the professional associations of their respective disciplines to understand how these codes of ethics reflected issues of public safety, sustainability, plagiarism, teamwork, and public perception of the engineering profession. Students reported that the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the American Society of
Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
(IEEE) refer to engineering as service to humanity. For both ASCE and ASME Codes of
Ethics, Principle #3 refers to issues of professional identity, with engineers “striving to increase the competence and prestige of the engineering profession” [16], [17].
While the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) does not explicitly refer to public perception of the engineering profession in its code of ethics, it does highlight issues of sustainability, requiring its members to conduct and agree “to accept responsibility in making decisions consistent with the safety, health, and welfare of the public, and to disclose promptly factors that might endanger the public or the environment” [18].
The instructor then presented the image of the three-legged stool of sustainability to the class, with each leg representing one aspect of sustainability: environmental, economic, and social.
Students were required to link the subject matter of their CSL projects to environmental and social sustainability. For environmental sustainability, the instructor encouraged a systemsbased approach to thinking (e.g. rock formation cycle). For social sustainability, students explored interconnections of gender, race, and poverty through assignment prompts and scaffolding exercises.
5 “CHANGING THE CONVERSATION”
Scaffolding included the use of the podcast to the NAE’s book entitled Changing the
Conversation about public misconceptions of engineering [19], the companion blog site, and the online messaging toolkit which names the problem, suggests the solution, and prompts action to be taken [1]. Scaffolding questions were designed to “translate” these key
American messages, aimed at licensed engineers, to the more specific context of their
Reading Week projects at inner-city schools in East Vancouver, Canada. Students generated specific contextual questions beginning with a W5 heuristic of “who, what, when, where, and why” questions.

6 STUDENT TRANSFORMATIONS
6.1 Core Concepts: Audience and Purpose
Students were then required to re-formulate their responses from the W5 brainstorming exercise in terms of the rhetorical core concepts of technical communication: audience and purpose, beginning with references to Aristotle. Students then linked these re-framed responses to issues of professional identity and sustainability vis à vis the NAE’s call to
“change the conversation” and the various codes of ethics they had explored earlier. This exercise revealed the complex and multi-level nature of the assignment: (1) the CSL projects in general, and (2) the APSC 201 assignments in particular. The core concepts of technical communication were then periodically reinforced with rhetorical theory on audience and purpose.
Asked about audience, and how their formal reports might be read/used and by whom, students responded in notably different ways: students in the regular stream did not think beyond the classroom, stating that the report would be read and marked by the instructor and served the purpose of fulfilling an assignment for a required course. Students in the CSL stream suggested this as well, but added that their reports may be read by elementary school teachers in the school district for future university-community collaborations, that their reports may serve as the basis for grant applications for funding of computer labs at inner-city schools with limited resources, and that their reports may help future cohorts of APSC 201 anticipate some of the challenges and rewards of CSL (since they were the first cohort in this course to engage in such a project).
6.2 From Proposal to Formal Report
The pre-project assignment involved writing a proposal indicating the audience, purpose, significance, division of labour, etc. for their project; this proposal laid the foundations for the post-project formal report. While the inter-textual connections between proposal and formal report were linear and clear to those students in the regular stream, they were non-linear and complex for those in the CSL stream. This is mainly due to the fact that students in the CSL stream needed to incorporate a logistical and experiential layer between the two documents that they could not fully anticipate. The constants were becoming known as they prepared themselves for Reading Week while the variables would necessarily remain unknown until they arrived at their chosen school and had survived a day, and then might still remain unknown. Students in the CSL stream were discovering that the human layer, with its unpredictable diversity of interaction, was a process imbued with uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity, sometimes with unknown/delayed cause and effect. This, along with the fact that they were the first cohort to engage in such a project made it difficult for them to write their proposals.
Without any models on which to base their expectations, the majority of students in the CSL stream understood that their role as mentor was to “help teach the kids.” Between the proposal and the formal report, the instructor urged them to re-think their definitions and roles. In terms of audience and purpose, what might they learn from this situation? While it is always difficult to assess critical reflection, engaging students in such activity enables them to develop language necessary to see themselves as agents in a social process.
Of the 60% of the APSC 201 students who chose the CSL project, over half revealed immediate transformative experiences in the formal report. They described how they had revised their views of their role as mentors, of the elementary school students, and of “innercity” schools. One team stated that by the second day, they had begun to realize that they were not leaders but facilitators, answering questions about what engineers do, why they

decided to study engineering, what university was like, etc. APSC 201 students’ experiences were overwhelmingly positive, with many stating that this was an unusual and memorable experience in their undergraduate years. Elementary school students also wrote letters to
APSC 201 students and expressed how “cool” they thought it would be to be a university student and how “even girls can be engineers.”
7 SUMMARY
With its emphasis on concepts of audience and purpose, technical communication courses are uniquely situated in the engineering curriculum, with the potential to provide students with opportunities to consciously “extend public knowledge and appreciation of engineering and geoscience and protect the profession from misrepresentation and misunderstanding” [15].
Although not yet licensed engineers, students can become familiar with engineering codes of ethics through lower-level technical communication courses in ways that are made tangible and meaningful to them through diverse CSL projects. Becoming aware of the need to
“change the conversation” early in their education instills in students social and civic responsibility that can be pedagogically reinforced in the curriculum and framed in larger terms of global engineering, both at micro- and macro- levels. In brief, a possible new role for technical communication is that of a broader role, as it moves from marginal status as
“handmaid” servicing the engineering profession to a mainstream community participant serving humanity.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to thank the students of Section 204 in the January-April 2012 term for their enthusiastic participation in pioneering a Community Service-Learning Reading Week project in Applied Science 201 at the University of British Columbia. She gratefully acknowledges the efforts of CSL Coordinators, Alaya Boisvert and Angeli dela Rosa, without whom this project would not have been possible. The author and university students also appreciate the elementary school teachers and students in the Vancouver School District for their welcoming collaborative spirit.
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