Writing Across Engineering: A First Year Implementation

The second and third trials: exposition, argument and engineering for everyone

The Engineering Scholars participating in our fall 95 pilot and the fall 96 regular offering of English 112H represent the scholarly top 10% of the incoming pool of first year engineers. We next explored how such a reading and writing format would play out with the balance of the first year class. We wondered if other students would also thrive, or whether we offered the first experiment with students and under circumstances which would not easily transfer to other situations. We needed to know if the pilot outcome was biased by choosing students who were so strong academically that they would make any new course idea seem good.

To find out, two of us (AB and DO) prepared an informal, substantial collection of readings,several times the size of that we used in English 112H. We began conversations with a few members of the English Department’s Freshman Council in order to recruit one or more teaching volunteers to try the Writing Across Engineering experiment in NCSU’s other two English contexts, Eng. 111 (exposition and argument) and Eng 112 (interpretation and evaluation). Steve Luyendyk joined to make us a trio; he has offered two sections of English 111 (Fall 1996) and is currently teaching a section of English 112 (Spring 1997). Thus, by May, 1997, we will have completed at least one full credit offering of the Writing Across Engineering notion for each first year composition course.

We have additional motivations to broaden this writing experience:
(1) More than three-fourths of our entering students take English 111 and/or 112. We felt it desirable to provide all new students who could elect this writing experience with a regularly scheduled opportunity.(We may expand to include other relater, technical majors)
(2) At NCSU, we expect to offer all Writing Across Engineering English courses in a format paired with a section of a first year "take-apart" lab titled Engineering 123: Product and Process Engineering. Since any student may elect the lab in either semester, it is necessary to provide the writing course at the appropriate English level, since the English courses are taken in numerical sequence.
(3) The NSF/SUCCEED consortium interests in course export and implementation elsewhere will be more plausibly argued if we have demonstrated successful installation locally under several typical circumstances, such as all possible configurations of our first year composition courses.

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