Promoting Professional Identity Formation in the First-year Engineering Classroom Using Metacognitive and Reflective Pedagogical Practices

The first-year engineering education curriculum at our university is currently being reimagined to meet the demands of a rapidly changing world. In addition to analytical skills, emerging engineers need to develop competencies like collaboration, creative problem solving, and innovative thinking. These 21st century skills are essential professional attributes which set up young engineers for success in the modern interdisciplinary workplace. "Introduction to Engineering Design" is a required first-year course that empowers novice engineers with such future-oriented and broadly transferable skills. "Introduction to Engineering Design" also aims to transform professional identity formation in first-year engineering students from a process of subconscious introjection to an intentional and explicit part of the curriculum. To do so, we are implementing the "Engineering Notebook," an active learning strategy which employs metacognition and reflection to help first-year students construct meaningful new worldviews as engineers. The "Engineering Notebook" writing assignments will prompt students to perceive and analyze the interconnected systems at play in the world from an engineer's perspective, discern how to improve existing systems, create new systems, and propose creative solutions to a wide range of technical problems. We will design writing prompts and facilitate discussions to spark student curiosity about the multifarious ways in which the modern world depends on engineering for the infrastructure that allows societies to function. To develop their professional powers as systems thinkers and designers, novice engineers must begin by keenly observing the world around them, asking critical questions, and formulating novel approaches to solving the engineering problems of today and tomorrow. Additionally, students need to understand their own thought processes, becoming conscious of the ways that they take in information, synthesize it, and make decisions. In this semester-long exercise in metacognition, first-year students will connect their lived experiences to the fundamentals of engineering, discussing issues of equity and bias as they relate to the technical systems that they will soon design and manage as engineering professionals. By doing so, they will develop emergent worldviews as engineering design thinkers and explicitly build their own professional identities as engineers from the ground up. Using the "Engineering Notebook," students will make their development as engineering design thinkers visible to themselves, empowering them to enunciate their evolving skills as creative and analytical problem solvers. In the process, they will develop essential professional writing and oral communication skills. Additionally, the "Engineering Notebook" exists to build novice engineers' sense of belonging to and ownership over their newly forming professional identities. As such, we intend for this project to promote growth mindset and support retention efforts in the first-year engineering program. Throughout the semester, we will continuously assess the efficacy of the project at meeting its stated goals. We will iteratively implement modifications to make the "Engineering Notebook" a more powerful reflective tool for metacognition and professional identity formation. We aim to develop this project for deployment across our university's transforming first-year engineering curriculum. In this paper, we will report on our findings, providing useful takeaways for first-year engineering curricula at a variety of institutions.