Work in Progress: Improving Communication Skills of Engineering Students by Employing Texts such as Fairy Tales An Interdisciplinary Approach

This paper describes an experiment for an interdisciplinary study at the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences (FRA-UAS). It is a cooperative teaching approach of a professor for computer science and mathematics and one of communication sciences. All students of the university have to attend a module from the interdisciplinary studies pool and this means, the working groups are very heterogeneous with students from all the four departments: Architecture/Civil Engineering/Geomatics, Computer Science and Engineering, Business and Law, Social Work & Health. The link between these disciplines is that throughout all working environments - besides the required professional expertise - proper communication skills are mandatory. However, these soft skills include not only, for example, single extracts of knowledge about rhetoric or presentation technique training. Therefore, it is much more important to start with a rather holistic approach towards understanding the basic patterns of communication, in order to succeed in professional practice. Fairy-tales, as kind of creative and cultural relevant texts with deep symbolic value offer a rich factory to achieve several skills in the multidisciplinary education. Specific skills to improve are, for example, understanding and finding of denotative and connotative meanings, associations and symbols, innovative thinking, historical social approach, similarities to modern times, free retelling or discussing a given text, and team work.