“We’ve Always Been Engineers:” Indigenous Student Voices on Engineering and Leadership Identities

Abstract

Background: How do Indigenous engineering students describe their engineering leadership development? The field of engineering has made only slow and modest progress at increasing the participation of Indigenous people; an identity-conscious focus on leadership in engineering may help connect the practice of engineering with Indigenous students’ motivations and values. Methods: This study utilized a grounded theory qualitative approach to understand how Indigenous engineering students at a U.S.-based university experience engineering leadership. We explored the experiences of four Indigenous engineering students through one interview and one focus group. Results: Students pointed out how Indigenous peoples had long engaged in engineering work before contact with European settlers, and they saw an opportunity for leadership in applying their engineering knowledge in ways that uplifted their home communities. Conclusion: In addition to ways that engineering programs can better support Indigenous students who aspire to become practicing engineers, our study pointed to new directions engineering programs could take to frame engineering work as providing a toolkit to improve one’s community to leverage a wider set of motivations for entering engineering among many different communities underrepresented in engineering, including Indigenous students.

Social identities and leadership identity development

“…Primarily focused on the development of an engineering leadership identity, the authors of this grounded theory study found resonance in the LID model, particularly the transition from seeing leadership as behaviors exercised by those with formal authority to seeing leadership as a community‐oriented process. Moreover, the findings demonstrated how Indigenous college students understood and practiced decolonized leadership , highlighting the importance of the “community uplift that restores the sovereignty of First Nations” (Kwapisz et al., 2021, p. 15).…”

“…Additionally, Xu (2019) found academic success was a critical factor to building leaders' self-confidence, and that the participants reported that their experiences of leadership development were rapid. Kwapisz et al (2021) also used the LID model to study the leadership development of Indigenous engineering students. Primarily focused on the development of an engineering leadership identity, the authors of this grounded theory study found resonance in the LID model, particularly the transition from seeing leadership as behaviors exercised by those with formal authority to seeing leadership as a communityoriented process.…”