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Pilot Collaboration and Program Development: Engineering Senior Design and Spanish for Cross- Disciplinary Literacy

Introduction

Modern language scholars have begun in recent years to challenge educators to develop a framework for language that, as noted by Heidi Byrnes in the Association of Departments of Foreign Language Bulletin, “intimately relates knowing [the language] to diverse ways of knowing” (Byrnes, 11). [1] In proposing literacy as a framework for advanced second language acquisition, Byrnes also challenges language educators to link educational decisions to societal demands and to educate young people for the “undisputed complexity of human meaning making in and through language.” (14). As Byrnes makes clear, moving toward a socio-culturally grounded, genre-based literacy “locates language use in the context of social practice and meaning-making across disciplinary boundaries” (13). Language proficiency efforts, intercultural communication competencies, and service learning initiatives have all combined to foster a new praxis of language use that allows for a more critical rethinking of disciplinary boundaries, beyond the purely verbal or grammatical, and toward more transformational cultural and intercultural literacies. Within this theoretical framework, the pedagogical experiment we describe here is an example of an educational praxis that may point beyond language learning per se, toward the acquisition of other ways of knowing and learning. The purpose of this study is a) to present a workable example of cross-disciplinary literacy-based language acquisition pedagogy for intermediate to advanced students of language within the context of a technological university, and b) to describe a unique pilot collaboration undertaken at Michigan Technological University in spring 2006 between students enrolled in Civil and Environmental Engineering International Senior Design and Humanities’ Spanish for Special Literacies. Through the framework of technical and cultural translation, students engaged in the practice of professional communication and heightened their awareness of the socio-cultural context in which all communication, including engineering communication, is embedded.

Background

When we first described our modern language efforts at curriculum design within the specific context of Michigan Technological University (The Canadian Modern Language Review) [2], the position of the Modern Language Program within our Department of Humanities was viewed as ambivalent or marginal because the science

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Boschetto-Sandoval, S., & Sandoval, C., & Phillips, L. (2007, June), Pilot Collaboration And Program Development: Engineering Senior Design And Spanish For Cross Disciplinary Literacy Paper presented at 2007 Annual Conference & Exposition, Honolulu, Hawaii. 10.18260/1-2--2383