This year marks the 30th anniversary of the creation of the Engineering Communication Program (ECP). Housed within the Institute for Studies in Transdisciplinary Engineering Education and Practice (ISTEP), ECP helps ensure that students are proficient not only in their technical skills, but also in the ability to effectively communicate with others, both within and beyond their discipline.
Professor Robert Irish (ISTEP) is the founder of the program and continues to serve as a communication instructor. Irish is also the recipient the 2026 University of Toronto President’s Award, the university’s highest honour for teaching excellence.
ISTEP’s Mason Subotich sat down with Irish to find out more about ECP: how it started, how it has evolved, and why communication is more important than ever for engineers.
Take us back to the moment when ECP first came into existence. How did the idea come about, and who helped bring it about?
Before the Engineering Communication Program existed, the faculty conducted a review of its graduates. The reputation at the time was that our students were excellent technically, but communication was identified as a big weakness. Michael Charles, the Dean at the time, was a major champion and advocate for communication skills for engineers and tasked me with addressing this.
From the beginning, integration — not stand‑alone communication courses — was central. I met with four departments and looked for places where engineering writing was already happening and could be supported. This led to early embedded work in courses from first year to capstone. At that time, we were known as Language Across the Curriculum.
Over time, that early integration grew into a program‑wide philosophy; working inside engineering courses was in our DNA. This approach is what led to the creation of Engineering Strategies & Practice and Praxis, and the development of communication pathways across all years in each program.
Over time, more faculty joined the team, and in 2007 we became the Engineering Communication Program as we are known today.
What are the expectations on todays’ engineers to be effective communicators? Is this different from 30 years ago?
Technical knowledge is necessary but not sufficient. The skills that elevate an engineer — technical knowledge, ethical reasoning, critical thinking — are interconnected, with communication acting as the connection point.
Thirty years ago, the expectations for engineers’ communication skills were very different. Someone, usually an executive assistant or a pool of admins, was always there to filter your writing. Today, that buffer is gone. The expectation is now that the engineers themselves are making those calls, communicating clearly with clients, teams and stakeholders.
Today, I’m proud to say that we have made significant progress shifting the narrative, and U of T’s engineering graduates are now widely perceived as excellent communicators.
What makes the ECP unique compared to other communication supports?
Communication is a blend of literacies, and teaching communication inside the context of engineering meant learning how engineers think.
There is a difference between the ‘science mind’ and ‘design mind’ — lab reports follow a fixed structure, while design reports are open‑ended, but still rigorous. The key is teaching how to manage ambiguity while maintaining logical discipline.
This led to ECP’s signature teaching approach: treating communication as a design activity. Framing everything from a document to a presentation as design artifacts helps engineering students immediately connect communication to their core identity as designers and problem solvers.
There are two defining features of the ECP that makes it stand out.
The first is that it is built within engineering. It’s not the English department. We are responsible to engineering. This ensures relevance, accountability and tailoring to discipline‑specific genres — design reports, memos, technical reviews, failure analyses and more.
The second is deep integration and co‑teaching. In courses such as Praxis, we piloted a co-teaching model in which instructors completely dovetail communication and design lectures. I might talk for 15 minutes, then the design instructor speaks, then I come back in. The result is a highly dynamic interplay, and students get to see directly how communication is a central part of engineering thinking — not an add‑on. This is what interdisciplinary teaching is all about.
What makes an engineer a strong communicator?
For oral communication, strong engineers are experts at reading the room, are very active listeners and can synthesize ideas clearly.
For written communication, clarity of thinking is paramount. Making a claim, supporting the claim and presenting a clear argument — this disciplined structure applies whether students are writing a four‑line email or a 100‑page report.
Across all forms, the foundation is logical argumentation; the idea of building argument is central to everything ECP does.
Looking ahead, what are some of the communication challenges and opportunities engineers are going to face?
The prominence of AI today creates a misconception that it will reduce the burden on engineers, but in reality the opposite is true. The need for strong communicators has heightened dramatically. At the end of the day,someone still has to sit across the table from the client and make the case.
AI also makes critical thinking more urgent. How do we know whether we can trust AI-generated information? This is another question engineers must evaluate.
In other words, I don’t think AI changes what’s important; clear‑eyed critical thinking is even more important than ever.
The good news is that the act of writing is incredibly effective at engendering critical thinking because it requires linear thought through expression. It forces you to go through the process of critical thinking.
My colleague’s motto captures the idea best: “How do I know what I mean till I see what I say?”
