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BOARD #147: Technical Communication Instruction Partnership with Engineering Faculty

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Conference

2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Publication Date

June 22, 2025

Start Date

June 22, 2025

End Date

August 15, 2025

Conference Session

Engineering Libraries Division (ELD) Poster Session

Tagged Division

Engineering Libraries Division (ELD)

Page Count

14

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/55966

Paper Authors

biography

Ashley S McGuire MLIS, PhD University of Alabama at Birmingham Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-1957-3135

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Ashley is the STEM Librarian for Engineering & Chemistry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She enjoys working with students, staff, and faculty to enhance everyone's learning and access to information, for both scholarly and personal pursuits. The Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (SoTL) is a particular passion of hers, which is reflected in her work in co-developing and co-instructing the graduate Technical Communication for Engineers course at UAB.

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biography

Michael McFall Lipscomb University of Alabama at Birmingham

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Michael Lipscomb is a lawyer, PhD, and Program Manager for the University of Alabama at Birmingham's Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. His research interests include data science, convergence, information theory, and software applications for healthcare.

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Abstract

Graduate students in STEM fields are often expected to communicate – both in writing and orally – at a professional level by the time they submit their theses and dissertations. Unfortunately, many graduate students lack opportunities to learn how to do that in a STEM setting. An informal review of US programs revealed that many offer writing courses modeled on traditional composition courses, which are not necessarily directed to the needs of STEM students. Further, many of these courses provide a series of isolated learning modules with little continuity or encouragement to revise and in which technological writing assistance is discouraged. This paper describes a collaboration between the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the STEM Librarian for Engineering & Chemistry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), a large R1 university. The result was the reinvention of Technical Communication for Engineers – a comprehensive graduate course in writing and presenting for academic, scientific audiences. The course design combined elements of general audience writing courses with those of science and technology courses. For this course, assignments were delivered in a project-based learning format whereby each assignment combined to produce a conference-style paper and presentation. The use of writing-assistive technology was encouraged. This course was also designed to introduce engineering graduate students, many of whom are international students, to a wide variety of resources available to students on campus, including the UAB University Writing Center, the Center for Clinical and Translational Science, and the UAB Libraries Office of Scholarly Communication.

McGuire, A. S., & Lipscomb, M. M. (2025, June), BOARD #147: Technical Communication Instruction Partnership with Engineering Faculty Paper presented at 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Montreal, Quebec, Canada . https://peer.asee.org/55966

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