2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering education strives to transform the field of engineering by integrating research and practice. These efforts often involve groups of individuals from fields such as engineering, sociology, and psychology and from different roles within a university (e.g., faculty, administration, student support staff). Each of these team members bring their own approaches to the generation, expression, and application of knowledge. These differences in thinking are key to the success of engineering education; however, they create tensions that prevent many groups from achieving their core goals. These tensions are often associated with ineffective communication or project management, which overlooks the more fundamental differences around what counts as knowledge and how knowledge is generated. Accordingly, the purpose of this project is to improve the effectiveness of engineering education research groups striving to make transformative change in engineering.

To meet this goal, we are using an integrated research and education plan to investigate the culture within which engineering education groups generate and apply knowledge to develop a deep understanding of how researchers negotiate differences in how group members think. We are exploring how both individuals and groups approach the generation, application, and expression of knowledge through a multimethod research approach that integrates an ethnographic case study (Phase A) with approaches from grounded theory (Phase B). The core outcome of these two phases will be a conceptual model that incorporates epistemic culture and individual’s negotiation of epistemic identities within engineering education research teams. Throughout the project, the research is being integrated with the education plan through a translation plan (Phase C) that includes a series of workshops.

The poster presented will provide an overview of our current work during Phases A and C of this four phase project. We are currently conducting the first phase of the research, which is an ethnographic study of a research group. We have also conducted one exploratory workshop that was designed to get feedback on our early findings and inform our development of interview and ethnographic questions.

Thus far, the ethnographic study has involved observations of group meetings that occurred across two different engineering education research teams. Our preliminary analysis revealed multiple instances of epistemic and nearly epistemic negotiations. The epistemic negotiations involved conversations about specific project decisions during which different views about research goals and approaches were discussed and interacted with by members of the team in a productive manner. The nearly epistemic negotiations included conversations that stemmed from a question rooted in research goals or approaches but did not involve individuals interacting with one another’s ideas. Both types of negotiations are being analyzed using Longino’s Critical Contextual Empiricism framework that defines the norms for an idealized knowledge generating community. Through this analysis, we are identifying the role that venues, uptake of critiques, standards, and intellectual “status” have in epistemic negotiations. For example, we have observed how the venue teams construct for their meetings influence the type of conversations that the team has and how much interaction with one another’s ideas occurs.

Our first exploratory workshop, conducted at a meeting for interdisciplinary engineering education projects, revealed the ways that faculty on these teams think about knowledge. For many participants, the idea of knowledge was deeply connected to institutional definitions (e.g., publications). Additionally, we have tentatively added to Longino’s framework to capture ideas that were brought up during the workshop that are specifically relevant for engineering education teams, such as the power that comes with specific disciplines and institutions. As we continue this work, we will further explore these initial ideas through our ethnographic and grounded theory studies.