Relevance of Poetry in English for Engineering Students

To promote creative thinking and the development of communication skills, we
created two poetry writing assignments and integrated them into two sections of a
required graduate course in an industrial and systems engineering program. The first
assignment, planned for the beginning of the semester, asked students to write a poem
about themselves in a specific poetic form. The second assignment, due at the end of
the semester, asked students to write a poem about a technical topic in the course
using the same poetic form. At the end of the semester, poems from 52 students who
agreed to participate in the study were collected and recorded as data. We
qualitatively thematically analyzed a subset of these poems using open and axial
coding and constant comparisons. In this article, we discuss the details of the chosen
poetic form, describe our approach to content analysis using a mixed methods
approach, present our preliminary results, and discuss the potential benefits of writing
poetry for creative thinking and the development of Communication Skills.
Perspective and Reflection, Stress Relief and Well-being, Interdisciplinary
Connections, Critical Thinking and Analysis, Emotional Intelligence, Effective
Communication, and Development of Communication Skills in Engineering
Education