Navigating the engineering literacy divide: design report collaboration practice realities
Authors: Harran Marcelle , Theunissen Howard William 
Published: December 2018

Purpose

In 2004, the Council for Higher Education (CHE) required a curriculum responsiveness to the teaching and learning of literacies at the programme level, which needed to be addressed across all disciplines. This study aims to describe a situated higher education (HE) collaboration project between mechanical engineering and the Department of Applied Language Studies (DALS) at Nelson Mandela University from 2010 to 2014. The collaboration project aimed to develop the literacies levels of engineering students, reduce the first-year attrition rate and prepare engineering students to meet the high graduate attribute expectations of a competitive workplace amid employer concerns that engineering graduate communication competencies were lacking and insufficient.

Design/methodology/approach

The collaboration study used a mixed-method approach, which included student and lecturer questionnaires, as well as an interview with one engineering lecturer to determine his perceptions of the collaboration practices instituted. As the sample was purposeful, two mechanical engineer lecturers and 32 second-year mechanical engineering students from 2012 to 2013 were selected as the study’s participants, as they met the study’s specific needs. From the questionnaire responses and transcribed interview data, codes were identified to describe the themes that emerged, namely, rating the collaboration practices, attitudes to the course, report feedback provided and report template use.

Findings

Most of the student participants viewed the collaboration practices positively and identified their attitude as “positive” and “enthusiastic” to the language/engineering report collaboration initiative. The report feedback practices were viewed as improving writing skills and enabling the students to relate report writing practices to workplace needs. The engineering lecturers also found that the collaboration practices were enabling and improved literacy levels, although time was identified as a constraint. During the four-year collaboration period, the language practitioner increasingly gained report content knowledge, as well as unpacking the specific rhetorical structures required to produce the report text by co-constructing knowledge with the mechanical engineering lecturers.

Research limitations/implications

Studies have shown that language practitioners and discipline lecturers need to change their conceptualisation of academic discourses as generic transferable skills and autonomous bodies of knowledge. Little benefit is derived from this model, least of all for the students who grapple with disciplinary forms of writing and the highly technical language of engineering. Discipline experts often tend to conflate understandings of language, literacy and discourse, which lead to simplistic understandings of how students may be inducted into engineering discourses. Therefore, spaces to nurture and extend language practitioner and discipline-expert collaborations are needed to embed the teaching and learning of discipline-specific literacies within disciplines.

Practical implications

For the collaboration project, the language practitioner and mechanical engineering lecturers focused their collaboration on discussing and negotiating the rhetorical and content requirements of the Design 3 report as a genre. To achieve the goal of making tacit knowledge and discourse explicit, takes time and effort, so without the investment of time and buy-in, interaction would not be sustained, and the collaboration would have been unproductive. As a result, the collaboration project required regular meetings, class visits and negotiations, as well as a language of description so that the often tacit report discourse conventions and requirements could be mutually understood and pedagogically overt to produce “legitimate texts” (Luckett, 2012 p. 19).

Social implications

In practice, peer collaboration is often a messy, complex and lengthy process, which requires systematic and sustained spaces to provide discourse scaffolding so that the criteria for producing legitimate design reports are not opaque, but transparent and explicit pedagogically. The study also describes the organisational circumstances that generated the collaboration, as establishing and sustaining a collaborative culture over time requires planning, on-going dialogic spaces, as well as support and buy-in at various institutional levels to maintain the feasibility of the collaboration practice.

Originality/value

Literacy and discourse collaboration tends to reduce role differentiation amongst language teachers and specialists, which results in shared expertise for problem-solving that could provide multiple solutions to literacy and discourse learning issues. This finding is important, especially as most studies focus on collaboration practices in isolation, whilst fewer studies have focused on the process of collaboration between language practitioners and disciplinary specialists as has been described in this study.