The College of Engineering at the University of South Carolina hosted a workshop July 20-22, 1998. The conference was funded by the Gateway Coalition, always a supporter of collaboration in achieving engineering education's goals.

For the past three summers, the University of South Carolina College of Engineering has hosted a gathering of educators concerned about communications skills of engineering graduates. These workshops, funded in part by the Gateway Coalition of Engineering Colleges, have fostered collaboration among engineering faculty and writing professionals in developing new ways to teach professional communications skills to engineering students.

Building a community for collaboration has been a major objective of the workshops. Each conference has incorporated a process that fosters interaction as a means to achieve the goals of individual participants and the larger group. This process, which we call Interactional Inquiry, involves all the participants in creating ideas.

Participants from various Gateway schools were in attendance, including NJIT, Polytechnic, and the University of South Carolina. In addition, representatives from Midlands Technical College, North Carolina State University, Penn State, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Florida A&M University also attended. A list of goals was compiled from the participants, reflecting each participant's personal dedication to the task of helping engineers become better communicators. The list focused the groups' Interactional Inquiry during the workshop. Several shared goals were implicit in the list: integrating communications and humanities subject areas into engineering education; designing effective freshman engineering courses; and implementing plans and establishing effective programs. These broad goals also helped participants examine the purpose of an integrated engineering curriculum: making all of education-humanities, communications, engineering-relevant to the life of the individual and engaging to students with a strong preference for science, math and technology studies.

Throughout the two-and-a-half day workshop, the participants attended brief plenary sessions, but spent most of their time in small groups, planning and creating course modules that could be used in a variety of settings. The plenary sessions described professional communications center services, freshman English, and freshman seminar programs for engineers. Breakout sessions focused on these same topics, as participants identified projects that they could complete in a short time and that would be useful to their own institutions and others. At the end of the workshop, each breakout group presented its materials to the larger group.

The modules drafted by the breakout groups reflect the synergy from interaction among professionals from different disciplines and different institutions. The sponsors of the workshop believe that while there is no substitute for actual conversation among those who create interdisciplinary courses at their own schools, the results of scholarly conversations elsewhere can be generative models for others engaged in similar pursuits.

In the Proceedings from the conference, Editor Deanna Ramey, and Contributing Editors Elisabeth M. Alford, Thomas Bowers, Samuel Morgan, and Thomas G. Smith wrote: "In our work as writing and professional communications consultants, we have come to value dialogue and collaborative discourse as a principal means of teaching learning the arts and skills of human communications. In our consultation within the engineering discourse community, we have listened to and watched engineering students acquire increasing competencies in written and spoken language as they engage in dialogue with professionals and peers. And we have listened with great pleasure as engineering students discussed ethics, literature, history, political science-all the liberal education topics that they explore through reading, writing, listening and conversation and that provide them the intellectual foundation for their future as leaders within society and the profession. We are convinced that discourse is at the center of education."

Thomas G. Smith, Consultant