Performing engineering: How the performance metaphor for engineering can transform communications learning and teaching

In the Engineering Communications Program (ECP) in the College of Engineering at Cornell University, we are proposing a new metaphor for engineering - engineering as performance. We are doing so for two reasons: 1) engineering as performance unites many of the “pedagogies of engagement” current in engineering education within a single conceptual framework; and 2) engineering as performance enables a transformation in how we understand communication, and therefore how we should approach communication learning and teaching. Our paper focuses on the latter of these reasons. We begin with a discussion of the present approach to communications instruction. Next, we describe the ways that our understanding of communication is transformed through this new metaphor. And finally, we describe in detail the changes that those transformations might suggest in communication learning and teaching, assessment, even curriculum design.