Engineering Design, Project Management, and Community Service Connected Through Servant Leadership

Abstract

Servant-Leadership is a leadership paradigm that emphasizes power sharing in decision making processes. It also encourages leaders to serve those they manage by propelling them toward high achievement while promoting their professional growth and self-efficacy. Servant-Leadership is also being pioneered as a teaching pedagogy at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, an approach that is unique because most academic institutions subscribe instead to the servicelearning model. In conventional academic settings, instructors are the authority figures with control over content, knowledge, assessment, and course outcomes. By contrast, servantleadership places instructors at the bottom of an inverted power pyramid where they provide a supportive foundation for the students above them. The authors hypothesize that this supportive structure lends itself ideally to faculty mentorship of engineering design-and-build projects; for example capstone senior design projects. In wellmanaged student projects, faculty members do none of the actual design or construction work. Instead, they mentor a team of students toward successful completion of the challenge. To evaluate the impact of a servant-leadership teaching pedagogy in an engineering setting, an interdisciplinary faculty collaboration was implemented that combined three components: 1) a curriculum-integrated design-and-build project; 2) an industrial engineering project management course; and 3) sponsored service to the community. Service is attractive to college-age people who value global citizenship and stewardship; community projects draw civic-minded perspective students and are highly valued in promoting student recruiting. Within one faculty member’s quarter-long senior-level mechanical engineering thermodynamics course, students designed, built, tested, and deployed three miniature aquaponic demonstration units for the Sweet Water Foundation (SWF), a Milwaukee-based non-profit organization. The SWF mission is to teach the public about sustainable urban agriculture. The project’s mechanical engineering (ME) students were supported by students taking an industrial engineering (IE) project management course from a different faculty member. IE students served as project managers. Simultaneously, a third faculty member, expert in implementing servant-leadership as a teaching pedagogy, secured project funding from the Brady Foundation while guiding the course instructors in mentoring students as servant-leaders. We report qualitative results from this interdisciplinary project guided by servant-leadership. Instructors report best practices learned by mentoring their engineering students through successful project completion using a servant-leadership teaching pedagogy. We also present and analyze survey data compiled from student participants in the university-wide servant-leadership community to quantify the positive impacts on our institution’s culture enabled through community service and faculty mentoring projects using the servant-leadership pedagogy.