Dean Porter’s sugggestion to "Let English do it" cleanly identifies the English department as the primary academic stakeholder in first year writing on any campus. No other department has extensive professional competence in the variety of writing styles and teaching approaches appropriate to composition, and no other department has the appropriately trained teaching personnel sufficient to staff the 200 sections per semester which NCSU offers.
The College of Engineering is the second stakeholder. Demands from industry, government, and even parents, include urgings that engineering graduates communicate more effectively through writing and speaking, and in a wider variety of formats. Such exhortations provide the opportunity for, and simply require, that English and Engineering engage in the type of collaboration and experimentation described here.
The new ABET Criterial 2000 guidelines will require that student performance be assessed after the fact. We pursued this route informally by arranging an OPEN HOUSE hosted by the students. Attractively framed 22x36" color posters of covers from books read were prepared and mounted. About fifteen members of the English Department, including all faculty and instructors of its Freshman Council, were invited. Invitations were also distributed to all engineering faculty and adminsitration. A total of about a dozen members from English and half a dozen from Engineering came to hear our ten first year University Scholars who stood next to posters of their chosing and conversed with the academic passers-by circulating around the room for an hour. Following these direct conversations, a half hour group discussion was held during which the English faculty posed further questions, and students commented on what had been learned. As several of the students were also taking an English 112 or 112H course at the same time, some comparative comments were elicited, and proved constructive and illuminating. A concensus appeared which endorsed the assertion of Bowen and Schneller that "writing can be taught equally well when the subjects of composition are scientific ones."
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