TAKING INTERNATIONAL ENGINEERING EDUCATION TO THE NEXT LEVEL: LANGUAGES IN THE ENGINEERING CURRICULUM

Since 1987 the International Engineering Program (IEP) at the University of Rhode Island has graduated almost 300 Engineering students with cross-cultural communication skills. Through its unique approach to preparing engineers to function in the global economy, this award-winning program serves as a model of international engineering education. Students in this 5-year, dual degree program (leading to a BA in a foreign language, and a BS in an engineering discipline), spend their fourth year abroad completing a semester of study and a six-month professional internship. After 10 years of success, the Spanish branch of the program (SIEP) needs to address several challenges it currently faces by expanding and diversifying the learning opportunities it creates for SIEP students, and integrating the interdisciplinary and international aspects more rigorously into the curriculum. This presentation will focus on one of the initiatives that we are exploring in order to begin to address those challenges: the development of Language Across the Curriculum courses for the College of Engineering. In our paper we will provide an overview of the characteristics of successful Languages Across the Curriculum models at other institutions as well as an analysis of the challenges that we face as we work to create successful applications of those models in our Engineering courses.