2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 270: Engineering Faculty Members’ Experience of Professional Shame: Summary of Insights from Year Two

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

In this paper, we present an overview of an NSF CAREER project, in which we seek to advance academic well-being by understanding how engineering faculty experience and reproduce experiences of professional shame. We present an overview of our data collection of non-standardized interviews with engineering faculty (n = 21) and how we are using interpretative phenomenological analysis to examine select individual cases (n = 12). We report our preliminary insights that 1) participants experienced complex and manifold socially constructed expectations that form the basis of their professional shame experiences and 2) participants’ experiences of professional shame varied according to how central their roles as faculty were to their identities. We describe our immediate next steps to integrate the processes of two qualitative studies so that we can generate insight into how engineering faculty link their experiences to their departmental cultures and ultimately train departments to build cultures where faculty and students are able to live well with the experience of professional shame.

Authors

Dr. James L. Huff http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6693-5808 Harding University [biography]

Dr. James Huff is an Associate Professor of Engineering Education and Honors College Faculty Fellow at Harding University. He conducts transdisciplinary research on identity that lies at the nexus of applied psychology and engineering education. A recipient of the NSF CAREER grant (No. 2045392) and the director of the Beyond Professional Identity (BPI) lab, Dr. Huff has mentored numerous undergraduate students, doctoral students, and academic professionals from more than 10 academic disciplines in using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) as a qualitative research method to examine identity and shame in a variety of contexts. Dr. Huff serves as Associate Editor for Studies in Engineering Education, Journal of Engineering Education, and is on the Editorial Board of Personality and Social Psychology Review. He has a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Harding University, an M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University, and a Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Purdue University.
Dr. Amy L. Brooks http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-9949-579X Oregon State University [biography]

Dr. Amy Brooks is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Oregon State University School of Civil and Construction Engineering and member of the Beyond Professional Identity lab at Harding University. Her current research is using interpretative phenomenological analysis to understand well-being and experiences with professional shame among engineering faculty. She is also part of a research team investigating context-specific affordances and barriers faculty face when adopting evidence-based instructional practices in their engineering courses. Amy's research interests meet at the intersection of sustainable and resilient infrastructure, emotions in engineering, and engineering identity formation.
Halle Miller Harding University
Grant R. Countess Harding University [biography]

Grant Countess is a BBA, accounting and MSIS student at Harding University, on track to graduate from the Honors College with Distinction by Spring 2023. With Dr. James Huff as his advisor, his honors thesis is focused on characterizing the lived experiences of professional shame in accounting students. Grant Countess is a member of the Beyond Professional Identity (BPI) lab where he assists Dr. Huff with his research on shame and identity in the professional education setting.
Kyle Shanachilubwa Harding University

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