Empowering Engineers: Enhancing Communication Skills through a Technical Communication Lab
- Conference
- Location
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Portland, Oregon
- Publication Date
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June 23, 2024
- Start Date
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June 23, 2024
- End Date
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July 12, 2024
- Conference Session
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Multidisciplinary Engineering Division (MULTI) Technical Session 3
- Tagged Division
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Multidisciplinary Engineering Division (MULTI)
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/47246
Paper Authors
Amanda Dawn Hilliard The Johns Hopkins University
Amanda Hilliard received her MA in Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language and PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Birmingham in the UK. She has taught writing and communication courses abroad in South Korea, Vietnam, and Ecuador, and in the U.S. in Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and Maryland. She currently teaches in the Center for Leadership Education at the Johns Hopkins University.
Ryan Hearty
The Johns Hopkins University
orcid.org/0000-0002-5046-0617
Ryan Hearty teaches in the Center for Leadership Education within Johns Hopkins University's Whiting School of Engineering. He obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and his PhD in history of science from Johns Hopkins University. As an engineer at JHU's Applied Physics Laboratory, Hearty built radio communications hardware for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. As an historian, he has studied collaborations across disciplines of engineering and applied science since the 1930s. His doctoral dissertation analyzed the rise and development of water quality management, a multidisciplinary field of applied science, from the New Deal to the Clean Water Act.
Abstract
Communication labs and writing centers at universities support ABET-accredited engineering programs’ mandate to train students “to communicate effectively with a range of audiences” [1]. In this paper, we describe efforts to establish and analyze a new technical communication lab within the engineering school at Johns Hopkins University. In its first three semesters in operation, consultants at the Technical Communication Lab (TCL) completed over 1,000 sessions for 294 students. On a post-session survey, almost all students rated their session excellent, stated they would return to the TCL, and affirmed they would recommend the center to others.
However, the Technical Communication Lab still faces some challenges in terms of advertising, logistics, and breadth of services. To alleviate these concerns, the TCL will partner with faculty in different departments, investigate other scheduling software, publish student-facing resources on its website, gather support resources and additional training for its consultants, and offer several workshops each semester for the engineering school. We hope other institutions can apply our “lessons learned” when developing their own centers and resources to improve their engineering students’ communication skills in multiple disciplines.
Hilliard, A. D., & Hearty, R. (2024, June), Empowering Engineers: Enhancing Communication Skills through a Technical Communication Lab Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://peer.asee.org/47246
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