Integrating Critical Thinking & Writing Curriculum Into Freshman Engineering

Being able to use critical and analytical skills, as well as the ability to communicate this thinking, are essential to people in engineering. At the University of Hartford, three faculty members from introductory engineering courses, and three faculty from the freshman writing program teamed for fall 2000 to develop engineering and writing classes that actively and deliberately overlapped. Classes were organized around a list of shared outcomes and shared activities developed during a series of workshops. Based on these shared outcomes, each team developed areas of specific content overlap and then developed shared, supporting activities. This paper will discuss how shared outcomes and activities were developed, the progress of these classes through the semester, what we were able to achieve, and which elements looked good on paper but didn’t work in practice.