Teaching societal leadership through design: Case study of a cohort-based social innovation engineering leadership program

Abstract

Engineering students are well equipped with a technical background to become agents of social change. This paper highlights a co-curricular social innovation program that aims to foster that potential through team-based project-based learning. Key teaching methods are described, such as how students establish a vision, scope complex projects, effectively build teams, and leverage failure and iteration for learning. The program faces challenges maintaining student engagement and getting them to fully embrace learning through failure, but has had significant success in fostering self-reflection. It has also been successful in creating a structure whereby personal and leadership learning happens alongside design and project-oriented learning. There is an opportunity for the teaching methods and structure of this program to be applied to other contexts in an effort to improve student team learning outcomes and find ways to integrate leadership learning into core technical and design courses.