| The current study examined women engineering co-op students learning about engineering discourse practices in the workplace. The study included a survey of recent engineering graduates (92 men, 84 women) of Midtown University (a pseudonym), and case studies of five women Midtown engineering students enrolled in co-op during spring and summer 1997. Survey results aided in designing the case studies, which examined more closely the experiences of women co-op students in a variety of workplace environments, and who were majoring in engineering fields that have been identified as particularly attractive to women: civil, chemical, and industrial engineering. The case studies relied heavily on interviews, site visits, and writing samples. Although the survey provided useful information about the amount of time respondents believed they spent writing during co-op, the kinds of documents they wrote, and aids for learning to write, the case studies revealed the complexity of the learning process, involving the quality of the mentoring relationship between supervisor and student, the availability of sample documents to model, the presence of supportive co-workers, students' prior writing experience and disciplinary knowledge gained in school, the kinds of tasks students' are assigned during co-op, and students' engineering specialty and gender. Perhaps the most important finding was that the women studied here all believed that engineers use writing to persuade, which seems to contradict previous research suggesting that engineers do not view their writing as persuasive, but as simply presenting facts that speak for themselves. It is unclear whether or to what extent gender may have influenced the women's perceptions about engineers' use of persuasion; it is perhaps more likely that they were attracted to engineering fields and co-oped in workplaces in which persuasion was integral to the work of engineers. Future research needs to compare the perceptions of men and women engineers across engineering specialties and workplace contexts. The study findings have implications for researchers and teachers of business and technical communication, writing in non-academic settings, experiential learning, gender studies, writing across the curriculum, and writing in the disciplines. |
