Poetry Writing in Engineering Education: Results and Insights From an Exploratory Study

Abstract To cultivate creative thinking and communication skills development, we created and incorporated two poetry-writing assignments into two sections of a required, upper-level undergraduate course in an industrial and systems engineering program. The first assignment, due at the beginning of the semester, asked students to write a poem about themselves using a specific poetic form. The second assignment, due at the end of the semester, asked students to write a poem about a technical topic from the course using the same poetic form. At the end of the semester, the poems from 61 students who gave their consent to participate in the study were collected and entered as data. We analyzed a subset of these poems for themes qualitatively using open and axial coding and constant comparison. In this paper, we discuss the specifics of the chosen poetic form, describe our approach to content analysis using a mixed-methods approach, present our preliminary findings, and discuss potential benefits of poetry-writing to creative thinking and communication skills development in engineering education.