With focus on engineering education, we expect engineers to be important participants or actors in the problem-solving process related to problems such as climate changes. Experiences from the past reveals that using technology to solve problems often creates new problems. To avoid that, future engineers need to create solutions based on more than one discipline. Working together with other different disciplines demands new engineering competences. New competences related to understanding and solving the complex problems and competences related to collaboration and more specifically related to coordinating work across disciplines and boundaries. This thesis contributes to investigate how coordination, management and leadership, all competences needed for engineering students to structure and lead interdisciplinary students project, are framed in engineering education. The point of departure is in student centered learning environments, like problem and project-based learning (PBL) within the context of complexity and interdisciplinarity with different perspectives from students, faculty, and research. Main findings in this research indicate that a central concept in interdisciplinary project work is coordination, exemplified as students’ project management and leadership, especially for students working in teams of teams. However, articulation of these concepts is rather vague formulated in engineering education research and appears tacit in the literature, especially leadership. With an increased need for leadership in interdisciplinary students’ projects, a need for educational leadership is identified to define the visions and set the direction for changes in the engineering education. Changes that may work across the different faculty institutions involved in interdisciplinary projects scaffolding the students’ development of generic competences in a variation of different interdisciplinary project types.

Please email Henrik Worm Routhe to get a copy of the thesis.