| Engineering is synonymous with teams and team work. Practicing engineers emphasize the prevalent role of informal communication contexts, including team work and negotiation in the design process. Engineering education emphasizes teamwork as the means of project completion and knowledge construction. Communication across the curriculum (CXC) research to date, however, has not fully examined communication on teams as a unique and situated communication practice. Rather, CXC research has focused primarily on presentational speaking situations.; This dissertation extends extant research on presentational speaking and explores normative disciplinary communication behaviors for participation on mechanical engineering student project teams as they emerge in design team interaction. Three mechanical engineering student design teams provide the data upon which this dissertation is based. The study utilizes interpretive methodologies via transcript analysis, interviews, and participant observation to examine the communicative interactions embedded in the teamwork experience engineering students encounter in the design process. It employs a humanistic analysis of how individuals use communication to become competent members of a discipline.; The major premise guiding this study suggests that deeper disciplinary understandings of communicative behaviors inform cross curricular efforts in designing oral communication instruction to maximize students' disciplinary communication competency. Theoretically, this study contributes to existing literature by deepening understandings of disciplinary communication conventions by examining team participation as genre performance. Pragmatically, this study identifies normative behaviors in the context of teams to inform instructional development in communication across the curriculum efforts. |
