2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and group projects. Whether working on a team leads to innovative solutions or frustration often depends more on the dynamics amongst team members than the project itself. These dynamics can be especially important on interdisciplinary teams where individuals may have different ways of thinking (or epistemic beliefs) because of their disciplinary backgrounds. These differences are often not addressed because they are misidentified as communication challenges leading to tensions that can prevent the team from reaching their goals. Within the field of engineering education, working on interdisciplinary teams is essential as engineering education practice often comes from the integration of educational research, practice, and industry. We intend to study the epistemic culture of engineering education research (EER) teams, that is, how these teams generate and apply knowledge during their collaboration. In particular, we will examine how EER teams negotiate epistemic differences using an ethnographic case study approach.

For this Work-in-Progress paper, we studied a single interdisciplinary engineering education research team (EER Team) that was conducting a project implementing research into practice. We observed ten recorded EER Team meetings that occurred between 2020 and 2022, and we took field notes to document discussions the EER Team had that focused on using research approaches, planning, or applying knowledge and interactions between EER Team members that added to our understanding of the team dynamics.

From our field notes, we identified multiple instances that were epistemic in nature (i.e., centered around approaches to knowledge generation or application). Some of these instances were collaborative, with members of the EER Team sharing and integrating their ideas. Other instances revealed barriers to collaborative epistemic negotiations. To gain insight into why some of these interactions were collaborative while others were not, we applied Longino’s critical contextual empiricism (CCE) model. This model defines the four norms of an idealized interdisciplinary knowledge community. These norms are 1) providing venues for criticism, 2) uptaking criticism, 3) recognizing public standards, and 4) maintaining tempered intellectual equality.

In this Work-in-Progress paper, we will present our analysis and discussion of three instances using Longino’s CCE model. The first instance represents a collaborative negotiation, where members of the EER Team were open to different justifications of how to move forward with data collection, allowing us to see how this team enacted elements of the CCE model. The other two instances represent non-collaborative epistemic negotiations, where we observed a lack of criticism venues and an imbalance of intellectual equality. This work provides the foundation for future epistemic negotiations studies on engineering education research teams.