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Engineering leadership education has become increasingly popular over the past decade in response to national calls for educational change. Despite the growing popularity of the movement, however, reform efforts continue to be piecemeal in their delivery, driven largely by the priorities of program leaders who established them (Graham, 2012). If we as engineering educators wish to more systematically develop leadership skills in our students, we should begin by empirically examining and defining our phenomenon of interest: engineering leadership. Our article takes up this challenge by investigating how 82 engineers in five organizationally distinct roles define leadership and how their respective insights are shaped by their diverse organizational locations. After weaving together the perspectives of engineers in industry, human resource professionals, entrepreneurs, politicians and interns, we propose a poly-vocal definition of engineering leadership and identify practical implications for engineering leadership educators.

Case studies have been used by engineering ethics educators for several decades, following a path paved by legal educators in the late nineteenth century. Unfortunately, few of these cases connect the micro-ethical decisions of individual engineers with the macro-ethical consequences of their actions, leaving intact a long-standing division between ethics and equity in engineering education. Our paper highlights a curricular intervention aimed at helping bridge this ethics-equity divide. In particular, we document a three-year initiative to replace engineering ethics lectures with open-ended case study workshops. While early assessment results indicate that students found our workshops to be significantly more engaging than their first-year ethical compliance lectures, a recent episode of backlash demonstrates the ease and rapidity with which equity-based interventions can be derailed. Iterative optimization of our workshop in response to this critical incident suggests that engineering educators can bridge ethics with equity if they combine two pedagogical strategies emerging from distinct paradigmatic traditions: (1) infuse critical analyses into case study learning to avoid the pitfalls of moral relativism and (2) shift the tone of discussion from rational argumentation to respectful dialogue by including mindful listening activities.