以下文字,大意是MIT注重了对于未来科学家和工程师领导能力的培养. 来自1998年北京大学出版社出版的英语活页文选. MITS Leader Shape Program A new science and engineering undergraduate program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is helping prepare students to become leaders capable of envisioning and directing change in local, national, and global communities. Three years ago, MIT partnered with LeaderShape, Inc. to create the campus-based LeaderShape Institute. Program leaders call it a coherent, thoughtful, and innovative response to todays fundamental challenge to develop scientists and engineers who are prepared to lead with integrity both in technological fields and in society. Central to that effort is helping students learn to listen to society as it articulates its need for change. For the past three summers, the LeaderShape Institute has provided 120MIT science and engineering students with an intensive six-day experience featuring highly interactive teaching and learning methodologies. Throughout the program, students develop skills in problem identification and problem solving, professional ethics, decision making, dealing with uncertainty, working within a diverse community, and interpersonal communication. Most discussions and activities takes place in assigned small clusters, which provide supportive, safe environments that promote learning and develop new skills and attitudes. Each participant creates an individual plan of action called a vision, which is the hallmark of the LeaderShape curriculum. Each vision must be designed to bring positive change to the campus community, and it must be carried out during the following academic year. A new program component is aimed at developing teamwork skills among emerging leaders. Students work in interdisciplinary clusters of approximately 10 undergraduates to develop technological solutions for social change. Students are encouraged to identify the appropriate steps to design, develop, prototype, and distribute their solutions. In the upcoming academic year, MIT LeaderShape students will be invited to adopt one or more of these cluster visions and to pursue the technological solutions to social issues identified in the past semester. With faculty and staff, the students will have an opportunity to work as an interdisciplinary team in the yearlong pursuit of appropriate solutions. Students may elect to receive academic credit for these efforts. Through the LeaderShape program, MIT is preparing tomorrows science and engineering leaders to listen to the world as it tells them what it values. As they listen, they will hear that society supports a fundamental commitment to basic research, but has concerns about crime, disabilities, hunger and homelessness, and the environment. The engineering and science professions can be major contributors in helping solve these problems, but only if future scientists and engineers are prepared to consider these problems more than they have in the past and to help society find solutions. The MIT program may be a model for other institutions seeking to provide such preparation to their students. (From Education Record , Summer/Fall,1997)
标签: 学生
