Abstract
Engineers face the ongoing challenge to effectively communicate for diverse purposes and audiences across multiple settings. The authors interviewed 10 practicing water resources systems engineers to collect their lived experiences of the use of water resources systems analysis in their workplaces. Thematic analysis was used to identify three key communications hurdles practitioners face: stakeholder influence over the communication process, engineers as central to communication and decision making, and communication as an opportunity to educate stakeholders and engineers. Practitioners recommended classroom activities to overcome these hurdles and better integrate communications training into curricula. Recommendations include (1) expanding the use of case studies, (2) adding opportunities for role plays and team activities, (3) providing students with more practice on how to hold effective discussions, facilitate teamwork, and resolve conflicts, and (4) providing students with the broader contexts for class problems, including how political/institutional constraints, bureaucracies, and social issues may constrain communication and technical solutions. This study shares 22 example activities as online educational resources in a free, open, searchable repository and shows how activities can serve as a bottom-up approach to integrate communications training into the engineering curriculum.
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Data Availability Statement
All interview questions and notes from the interviews with practitioners are available online as open educational resources on the Ecstatic Repository provided by Rosenberg (2019) under the heading “Interviews.” Example classroom activities cited in this article are also available on the same Ecstatic repository.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Environmental & Water Resources Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers as part of the Excellence in Systems Analysis Education and Innovative Communication (ECSTATIC) task committee. The authors thank the 10 interviewees and Shane Brown for constructive feedback on an earlier draft.
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Information & Authors
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Published In
Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice
Volume 145 • Issue 4 • October 2019
Copyright
©2019 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Dec 12, 2018
Accepted: Jun 26, 2019
Published online: Aug 9, 2019
Published in print: Oct 1, 2019
Discussion open until: Jan 9, 2020
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