Supporting Leadership Development through Psychologically Safe Experiential Learning

Abstract

Despite the mission of universities to help engineering students develop leadership, many engineers perceive that this ambition is not being met in practise, but often later in engineers’ professional careers. This work on engineering education explores how educational organisations can support engineering student’s leadership development using experiential learning. A constructivist grounded theory methodology was used to explore the topic through 25 interviews with engineering student leaders, professionals, and educators in TU Delft and Engineers Without Borders USA. The experiential methods explored included Project Based Learning, Project Based Service Learning, and Internships. Perceptions of students, educators, and engineering professionals alike confirmed that engineering leadership is a complex notion. While viewed by some as being an individual responsibility, it is viewed by others as being a more abstract group process. Leadership development is part of a dynamic process, one that is rarely explicitly strived for by students or course designers. While students indicated that they believed experiential learning helped support their leadership development, they rarely joined those contexts with that goal in mind. Additionally, the experiential contexts explored weren’t usually designed with leadership development as an explicit outcome. This may be because leadership is a difficult outcome to measure. It is also possible that a focus by universities on technical qualification has led to a trade off in the subjectification and socialisation of students as socially responsible leaders. All of this considered, engineering leadership development will likely continue to remain an elusive to measure goal. However, this research contributes to the larger field by presenting a set of factors of experiential methods that organisations can use to support leadership development. They can do this by structuring experiential learning methods in ways that promote a feeling of psychological safety within student engineering teams.