Engineers as Authors: Technology, Nature, and Sustainable Communities

I had the fortune to be a bit experimental in the classroom this semester. Curricular innovation, they call it. More precisely, in one of my courses (called "STS 200: Technology, Nature, and Sustainable Communities"), the students wrote an entire book. These are engineering students. All engineers. They wrote a book. A book about relationships between technology and nature as exemplified in a local UVA sustainable housing project called ecoMOD. A full, cohesive, compelling, well-argued, well-researched book. We were glad to see a nice write-up of the project linked from the university homepage today: "Engineering Authors: Students Collaborate on ecoMOD Book".

It was good timing, then, when Dave posted the "Sustainability" and Gingerbread House post last week. That post also connected to earlier themes at The World's Fair that revolved around sustainable consumption patterns. I'd forgotten about this, but we wrote a post about ecoMOD itself exactly one year ago, here.

As Dave wrote up his gingerbread post, I was knee-deep editing the fourth draft of the book. Here is how we got there:

My role in the course project was first that of regular classroom teacher guy--readings on technology and nature, discussions about them, response papers, short quizzes, even a few films, the whole routine. Then, my role shifted to that of a project manager--before the halfway mark of the term, we began to divide the class into "chapters," and I began to manage the process of devising a Table of Contents and organizing the workload across the 25-person class. As all of this happened, I had to somehow convince the students--all of whom seemed to be above average, by the luck of the draw--that they actually could co-author a full book in little more than half a semester. Then, in my third role, I became the executive editor. This brings me to re-read the manuscript for the fifth time this week. And it's long. About 200 pages. But it's good and, dare I say, I think the experiment worked.

Most fulfilling for me, so far, has been that the students were basically decent writers. I had literary ambitions when I began the class, with the belief that engineering students could write every bit as well as humanities students. I wasn't sure if that was true; I simply asserted it. And I surely can't know if it is entirely true, even now that we're almost finished--I won't be able to do the same project with humanities students to provide a comparison. But I do know that these students were able to hold together technical content and technical debates about sustainable design, about green technologies, and about the cultural context of those things with great facility.

We're in the process of negotiations with a local printer to get a printed and bound copy of this thing. I'll let you know how that progresses. It will take another few months before we would have a copy in hand. In the meantime, I'll finish up this post and get back to the editing, because our next step is to send the ms. to an outside reader, who will serve as a peer reviewer. After that, and after we revise based on that feedback, the Dean of the Engineering School hopes to proceed with the print run. And so do we.