The Formation of Undergraduate Engineers as Engineering Leaders

如今，工业界和政府的领导人都在呼吁增加工科毕业生的数量，以保持国家的经济竞争力。然而，增加工程专业毕业生人数的预期积极影响将是有限的，除非充分利用这些毕业生的能力。具体地说，解决当今的复杂挑战将需要来自许多领域的专家合作。为了使这些合作取得成功，他们必须利用这些小组成员的不同能力。要做到这一点，执业工程师必须发挥技术领导力。因此，工科本科生需要学习如何在成为工程师的过程中成为有效的领导者。不幸的是，工科教育工作者目前对工科学生如何成长为领导者还没有足够的了解。这个项目旨在提高我们对领导力在成为工程师过程中所扮演的角色的理解，以及如何在工科本科生中培养工程认同感。该项目提出，将自己视为工程领导者，既需要发展工程身份，也需要发展领导身份。鉴于身份在学习中所起的核心作用，本项目调查了成为工程领导者的过程。通过理解领导身份和工程身份之间的关系，这项工作将为提高本科工程师在大学期间的领导技能提供基础，使用跨种族的领导力概念来服务于不同的学生群体。目前在工程教育中培养工程师领导技能的方法几乎没有理解领导能力如何适应工程工作的异质性的更广泛的图景，或者领导在形成工程身份中所起的作用。这个项目试图通过一种顺序的、混合的方法研究来解决这一差距，从而为工科本科生发展一种扎根的工程领导理论。本研究将回答三个研究问题：1)工科学生的领导认同与其他领域的学生相比如何？2)领导认同与工程认同之间有什么关系？3)工科本科生如何定义工程领导并形成工程领导认同感？这项工作认识到，工程师的形成从根本上说是一个身份发展的过程。这个项目结合了两个模型：Lave和Wenger的实践社区模型来理解工程学认同的发展，Komives等人的S领导认同模型来理解工科学生是如何培养作为领导者的自我概念的。使用这两个模型，本项目试图了解在本科生中，工程学和领导力认同的不同组成部分如何在综合的工程学领导力认同的发展过程中汇聚在一起。通过对国家数据的分析，扎根的理论方法将导致工程领导认同发展的解释模型。作为该模式的初步应用，将开发和测试一系列教育干预措施，使工程教育者能够更有效地培训工程学学生的领导力。

Today, leaders of industry and government are calling for increasing numbers of engineering graduates to maintain the nation's economic competitiveness. However, the expected positive impact from increasing the number of engineering graduates will be limited, unless the full capabilities of these graduates are harnessed. Specifically, solving today's complex challenges will require cooperation among experts from many fields. In order for these collaborations to be successful they must harness the diverse capabilities of members of these groups. For that to happen, practicing engineers must exercise technical leadership. Therefore, undergraduate engineering students need to learn how to be effective leaders during their formation as engineers. Unfortunately, engineering educators do not currently have sufficient understanding of how engineering students develop into leaders. This project seeks to improve our understanding of the role leadership plays in the process of becoming an engineer and how to develop an engineering identity in undergraduate engineering students. The project proposes that seeing oneself as an engineering leader requires both the development of an engineering identity in combination with the development of a leadership identity. This project investigates the process of becoming an engineering leader given the central role identity plays in learning. By understanding the relationship between a leadership identity and an engineering identity, this work will provide a foundation for improving the leadership skills of undergraduate engineers during their time in college using cross-ethnic notions of leadership to serve a diverse student body.Current approaches in engineering education to develop leadership skills in engineers do little to understand how leadership fits into the broader picture of the heterogeneous nature of engineering work, or the role leadership plays in the formation of an engineering identity. This project seeks to address this gap through a sequential, mixed-methods study resulting in development of a grounded theory of engineering leadership for undergraduate engineering students. The study will answer three research questions: 1) How does leadership identity in engineering students compare to those in other fields? 2) What is the relationship between leadership identity and engineering identity? 3) How do engineering undergraduates define engineering leadership and develop a sense of engineering leadership identity? This work recognizes that formation of engineers is fundamentally an identity development process. This project combines two models: Lave and Wenger's communities of practice model to understand development of an engineering identity and Komives, et al.'s Leadership Identity Model to understanding how engineering students cultivate a self-concept as a leader. Using these two models, this project seeks to understand how the separate components of engineering and leadership identity converge in the development of a combined engineering leadership identity among undergraduate students. Informed by an analysis of national data, a grounded theory approach will lead to an explanatory model of engineering leadership identity development. As an initial application of the model a series of educational interventions will developed and tested, enabling engineering educators to more effectively train engineering students in leadership.