Making connections to the workplace: situating technical communications assignments within professional practice

This paper draws on research in both technical communication and education to describe a problem-based learning approach to engineering design courses that more authentically engages students in the practice of communicating with specific audiences for specific purposes. By developing a learner-centered classroom in which faculty serve as mentor-managers rather than repositories of knowledge, instructors can develop communication tasks that more closely reflect the way texts function in the workplace. In doing so, they can better prepare students for role that texts play in professional practice and enable them to make decisions accordingly. The author includes results from pilot sections of capstone engineering design courses to describe the implementation and evaluate the effectiveness of the approach.