Using multi-disciplinary teams to teach communication to engineers, or "Practicing what we preach"

Many new engineering courses tell students how important it is to write clear reports and proposals, deliver polished oral presentations, communicate effectively with clients, and work well on multi-disciplinary teams. This paper suggests one model for accomplishing these objectives: a design and communication course for engineering freshmen based on a cross-disciplinary approach and taught by multi-disciplinary teams. This paper will summarize the intellectual and practical similarities between design and communication that form the basis of our collaboration, explain how our cross-school course is administered and taught, discuss how we are evaluating student progress, and outline the benefits of teaching design and communication in this multi-disciplinary way. We argue that this team model strengthens the theoretical underpinnings of our course while improving learning outcomes in both communication and design.