Secondary Collaborators
Richard Wesel, Professor and Associate Dean
Randall Fallows, Lecturer
Dino Di Carlo, Professor and Chair of Bioengineering
Jacob Schmidt, Professor of Bioengineering
Yang Yang, Professor and Chair of Materials Science and Engineering
Development of Writing II Courses for BioEngineering and Materials Science
BioEngineering would like to offer a Bioengineering/Biomedical Engineering-focused ethics and Writing II class to undergraduate students. The department is in a strong position to develop this new course with the recruitment of Mireille Kamariza, who has been leading the BE Capstone courses over the past two years and is passionate about developing a BE-specific Ethics and Writing course. The department performs regular reviews of the undergraduate curriculum in order to achieve continuous improvement as required by ABET accreditation. Student feedback is solicited through annual undergraduate town halls and anonymous surveys. Students have repeatedly indicated that the School-wide ethics and writing classes (ENGR 182EW, 183EW, and 188EW) do not connect closely to important ethics considerations in BioEngineering. In fact, BE students have launched a petition asking for a BE-specific Ethics course, and this petition has garnered over 90 student signatures. At present, BE students receive generalized training in writing that is available to all Engineering undergraduates. Yet writing is a very important aspect throughout the BE curriculum, and many BE courses assess students primarily on the basis of writing-intensive assignments (e.g. lab/project reports). We will guide students to take the new course in their sophomore year so that they can apply the ethical and writing learning outcomes during their junior and senior years. Writing instruction specific to BE will prepare students for the writing assessment they will encounter later in the BE curriculum, while robust ethics deliberation will enable them to approach advanced coursework with higher levels of critical awareness and engagement. We anticipate that the proposed new BE ethics and Writing II class will therefore contribute to student success in other BE classes as well. The Materials Science Engineering department is excited to develop a writing-II experience for their students as part of their two-quarter capstone design course sequence. This new experience will allow their students to develop technical writing skills that will be critical to their success as practicing Materials Science engineers. The Electrical and Computer Engineering department has already adopted this general approach, and there’s high confidence that this approach is a great fit for MSE students as well.