ECO-GT Charter for Engineering Communication Education

WHEREAS Communication is already present in labs, projects, reports, and presentations across engineering programmes. Its integration is fragmented, unevenly resourced, and rarely taught as a deliberate competence. The calls below combine cross-institutional research findings on how communication competencies can be taken up, supported, and strengthened in technical higher education, with input and reflections submitted and voted on by students at this conference

WE, educators and students of the ECO-GT Summer School and Conference, Vila Real, July 2026, call upon the engineering education community — curriculum designers, programme leaders, accreditation bodies, and faculty across technical and communication disciplines to

Calls to Engineering Educators

1. Make communication authentic and practical throughout. Ground learning in real formats, real roles and audiences, real interactions between engineers — including failures — and real career situations like interviews and workplace conflict. Use these real tasks — including defending technical decisions and working with standardisation documents — to build students' sense of what it actually means to be an engineer.
2. Embed, connect, and sequence communication across the institution and programme. Build communication into existing courses, assessments, and institutional structures — mapping what already exists, connecting topics across the curriculum, and anchoring it to accreditation, employability, and university strategy — while sequencing it developmentally across every year of study and adapting to students' differing starting points, rather than treating it as disconnected or one-off provision.
3. Train and support teachers as active, approachable facilitators. Give technical faculty practical tools, shared terminology and standards, and up-to-date technology to teach and assess communication; encourage openness to new methods and active, participatory teaching over one-way lecturing; and foster genuine relationships with students so they feel comfortable approaching staff with questions.
4. Rethink assessment around process, time, and simplicity. Assess how students think, decide, and collaborate throughout a project, not only the final grade; give students enough time on projects, since short windows limit what they can actually learn and produce; and keep assessment tools themselves simple — checklists and short reflections rather than heavy instruments. 
5. Build students' emotional, social, and conflict-handling capacity. Give empathy and interpersonal skill real space alongside technical training, and use real or simulated team situations so students learn to handle conflict and the unexpected together. 
6. Build professional relationships and collaboration. Create structured opportunities for students to network, engage stakeholders, and work with people from other disciplines as a core, explicitly taught skill. 
7. Make it safe to practice and fail. Let students rehearse, make mistakes, and learn without fear of consequences 

These calls to engineering educators are ranked by votes from the ECO-GT Summer School, UTAD, Vila Real, July 2026 (65 submissions, consolidated and deduplicated).