Envisioning sustainable community decision-making

Helping engineering students become strong communicators in diverse situations with diverse audiences is an important challenge for Engineering Communication instructors. Most civil-engineering students have little opportunity to practice the skills involved in working with stakeholders or to experience the collaborative process of communal decision-making, skills that will be particularly useful to them as engineers. To meet this challenge, I have devised a series of activities that engage students in constructing a collaborative space in which to discuss and analyze problem-based technical and social issues: a Town Meeting in which students role-playing environmental engineers present a plan for containing storm-water run-off to a diverse group of townspeople and officials. This mock Town Meeting is then followed by assignments asking students to reflect on what they saw, heard, and learned. This reflective writing reveals, for some students, a growing awareness of the complexity of both communication and engineering problems, as well as a recognition that communication styles vary widely. To enhance the situated learning experience and to facilitate richer assessment of its pedagogical effectiveness, I will expand the exercise to ask students to analyze the engineering design itself and will make more use of student teams to set their own agendas and mini-projects within the overall project module.