| Abstrakt: |
Engineers in the 21st century will be confronted with complex problems that require new competences to engage and collaborate with other disciplines. New engineering competences, such as leadership across interdisciplinary contexts, necessitate important changes in engineering education. To make such changes possible, however, the development of educational leadership is needed, including the creation of organizational structures and the training of staff to support the development of student leadership skills. This leads to the following research question: What kind of leadership can be identified in interdisciplinary student projects from a faculty perspective, and in which way can the development of students' leadership competences be supported? A model is introduced for different leadership concepts at both the faculty and the student levels. The research, comprising three different subcases, is based on data from 12 semi-structured interviews with members of the staff at the Faculty of Engineering and Science and the Technical Faculty for IT and Design at Aalborg University, where student teams work together on solving complex problems. The interview data was transcribed and coded in NVivo using thematic analysis. Findings illustrate the complexity of leadership involved in the student projects, in which teams collaborated with teams, supporting the leadership model introduced in this research, where examples of shared leadership, emergent leadership and rotating leadership were identified at the students' level. Educational leadership - reflected here in curricular structure, learning objectives, and projects as well as facilitation - is important for supporting the development of students' leadership competences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
