The Formation of Undergraduate Engineers as Engineering Leaders

今天，工业界和政府的领导人都在呼吁增加工程专业毕业生的数量，以保持国家的经济竞争力。然而，除非这些毕业生的全部能力得到充分利用，否则增加工程专业毕业生数量所带来的预期积极影响将是有限的。具体来说，解决当今复杂的挑战需要许多领域的专家进行合作。为了使这些合作取得成功，他们必须利用这些团体成员的各种能力。要做到这一点，实践工程师必须发挥技术领导作用。因此，工科本科学生在成为工程师的过程中需要学习如何成为有效的领导者。不幸的是，工程教育工作者目前对工程学生如何发展成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的过程中所扮演的角色的理解，以及如何在本科工程专业的学生中培养工程师身份。该项目提出，将自己视为工程领导者需要在发展领导身份的同时发展工程身份。这个项目调查了在学习中身份扮演的核心角色，成为工程领导者的过程。通过理解领导身份和工程师身份之间的关系，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，利用跨种族的领导观念为多元化的学生群体服务。目前工程教育中培养工程师领导技能的方法，对于理解领导力如何适应工程工作的异质性质这一更广泛的图景，或者领导力在形成工程师身份方面所起的作用，几乎没有什么帮助。本项目旨在通过一个连续的、混合方法的研究来解决这一差距，从而为本科工程专业的学生发展一个扎根的工程领导理论。该研究将回答三个研究问题：1)与其他领域的学生相比，工科学生的领导认同如何？2)领导认同与工程师认同的关系是什么？3)工科本科生如何定义工程领导并培养工程领导认同感？这项工作认识到，工程师的形成基本上是一个身份发展过程。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师身份的发展，以及Komives等人的领导身份模型来理解工程学生如何培养作为领导者的自我概念。使用这两个模型，本项目试图理解工程和领导身份的独立组成部分如何在本科生中形成一个综合的工程领导身份。通过对国家数据的分析，一个扎根的理论方法将导致一个工程领导认同发展的解释模型。作为该模型的初步应用，将开发和测试一系列教育干预措施，使工程教育工作者能够更有效地培养工程学生的领导能力。

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.