Enhancing Freshman Engineering Education: Integrating Freshman English Composition With Engineering, Math, Physics, Chemistry

摘要

In response to the need for changes in engineering education, six national coalitionsfunded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) have been formed. Although all of the institutions in each coalition are working to improve engineering education, Arizona State University, in the Foundation Coalition, is only one of three institutions integrating English into the freshman year curricula along with math, science and engineering "(Freshman Integrated Program in Engineering" or FIPE). This integration reflects a new paradigm in academia, a paradigm in which participants cooperate in a community whose goal is continuous improvement and mutual support rather than competition for limited resources and disciplinary separatism. However, in order to integrate English into an engineering curriculum at Arizona State University, we had to develop new ways of structuring and delivering English. In our program, students have benefited from integrated course content, a wider range of papers that more closely match their future educational and professional tasks, and assignments that reinforce the need to communicate as engineers with both technical and nontechnical audiences. Furthermore, the faculty (other than English) have enjoyed the positive reinforcement of writing skills that the Englishfaculty have been able to bring to the students. In this paper, we will explain the purpose and goal of such integration, the commitment and planning necessary for this to work, areas of integration, advantages, and overall results of the first year of teaching an integrated syllabus.