Re-envisioning the Writing Requirement: An Interdisciplinary Approach

AT NORTHWESTERN, we recently had an opportunity to 1 re-envision the writing requirement for engineering students-to imagine what goals we wanted the requirement to accomplish and to decide the best means for accomplishing those goals. The resulting course, Engineering Design and Communication (EDC), is a partnership between the Engineering School and the Writing Program at Northwestern University. It is an interdisciplinary, two-quarter, team-taught course that is project-based, team-based, and equally focused on design and communication. We are currently in the third year of teaching this course and are offering it to more than 260 engineering freshmen. By next year, EDC will be a required course for all 380 engineering freshmen at Northwestern. We believe this course to be unique, not only in its interdisciplinary content but also in its approach to the writing requirement. However, conversations with colleagues and our own experience with the business school at Northwestern suggest that this interdisciplinary model for the writing requirement is highly generalizable; we suspect that there are many opportunities for developing collaborative courses that resemble EDC.