A transdisciplinary approach for developing effective communication skills in a first year STEM seminar

Abstract

Many STEM graduates leave school academically prepared in their fields however business leaders have been stating that they often lack the more intangible qualities such as teamwork, critical thinking, communication skills, and the ability to manage interpersonal relations. These are often referred to as "soft skills", yet they are tightly coupled with professional performance. Furthermore, they are all connected to basic communication skills, commonly referred to as oral and written communication, and their close counterparts, listening and reading. Such skills are not only add-ons to a STEM job, they can make the difference between a successful and a failing career, team, or even corporation. In the last decade there have been efforts such as those by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) to advance broad-based systemic innovation to build and sustain strong undergraduate education in the STEM fields. Our group is in the early stages of an innovative initiative to provide alternative communication and humanities learning environments in STEM higher education. The group consists of faculty from several academic units including liberal arts, libraries, and technology. One of the learning experiences currently being tested involves the tight coupling of all forms of interpersonal communication, and information literacy with technological concepts. These are integrated into a learning experience aimed to develop the capacities of interpersonal communication and social and cultural awareness in a seminar environment. This paper will describe the design of a seminar learning experience called Culture, Communication, and Digital Narratives. On the surface, its purpose has the appearance of combining oral and written communication with information literacy and technology. However the seminar is much more, promoting storytelling as a way of thinking. Our value proposition is that artistic storytelling can help students learn, create, and communicate. The goals of the learning experience include enabling learners to more effectively discover creative ideas, understand themselves and other people (audiences), and communicate about them in a storytelling fashion, using performative and mediated techniques. As such, we have created a transdisciplinary, student and project-driven learning experience that enables students to communicate more effectively, and function in a professional context. All activities are structured into modules that combine oral, written, and performative communication. Students are immersed in both classical and contemporary theories and methods of communication. They learn on how to use ethos, logos and pathos-oriented messages, in the manner prescribed by Aristotle. They learn how to use cultural and intellectual meta-thinking for avoiding ethnocentric and biased message production. Students learn about these concepts by doing. They tell stories, engage in ethnographies, critique email correspondence or creating arguments via oral, written, video and auditory production. All projects are evaluated through a continuous process of feedback. We do not use a traditional grading method. Instead, each project contributes to acquiring a specific set of competencies. When the project deliverables demonstrate that the competencies are mastered, students are awarded "badges" that certify mastery. We adopted the successful Open Passport Badging System adapted by our university from the Open Badge Platform initiated by the Mozilla Foundation. We will describe our process of generating communication competencies from AAC&U inspired rubrics, and how these were mapped to learning outcomes, learning activities, and badges in the seminar environment. We will address the flexible strategies needed to manage the notions of time, place, or pace of learning. We will also present our findings from our first cohort, currently immersed in the seminar learning environment. The paper presents our suggestions for improvements of the seminar learning process.