01589893

Component

Transportation professionals need advanced communication and interpersonal skills to be effective. These skills are needed for working effectively with multidisciplinary teams and when designing and conducting public outreach processes. Professional education in transportation has the opportunity to integrate training in communication skills with the tools of transportation system design. To address this, the author worked with a professional facilitator to develop and implement facilitation and dialogue training modules as part of two graduate-level transportation seminar courses. The training had two objectives related specifically to transportation education: (1) training future transportation professionals to work in multidisciplinary groups; and (2) linking the theory and practice of public engagement in the transportation context. Using classroom- based research, the study’s main findings are that disciplinary differences (as well as other aspects of student diversity) tended to enhance learning, and that facilitation training helped students understand—in a concrete way, not just in theory—the practice of public engagement. Students developed awareness of interpersonal differences that could hinder mutual understanding, and they learned to communicate in ways that included every member of a group in order to have productive group processes. Future training should also include techniques for working in culturally and socio-demographically diverse groups.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABG20 Standing Committee on Transportation Education and Training.

01584066

16-3497

English

11p

2016

Transportation Research Board 95th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

References

Communication; Education and training; Graduate students; Multidisciplinary teams; Transportation careers

Education and Training; Transportation (General); I10: Economics and Administration

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2016 Paper #16-3497

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 12 2016 5:31PM