2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In the field of engineering education, our research teams are foundational to promoting change in engineering. These teams seek to address complex problems that require interdisciplinary solutions. Many of these teams work across disciplinary boundaries and include individuals from different disciplinary backgrounds (e.g., engineering, engineering education, psychology). Each of these disciplines have their own norms around the generation, expression, and application of knowledge. It is important that these teams are able to navigate differences in thinking. Failure to acknowledge, address, and integrate these differences can lead to tensions that negatively impact their ability to have their desired impact. A team’s norms and approaches around the generation, expression, and application of knowledge define their epistemic culture. A team’s epistemic culture affects all aspects of the research process such as the types of questions they answer, knowledge they generate, knowers they recognize, and knowledge they share.

Existing work across Team Science and philosophy of science has primarily focused on the broader processes of research integration, the structure of knowledge generation, and the influence of the nature of science on current approaches within interdisciplinary research collaborations. Due to the complexities surrounding differences in thinking, findings cannot be translated from one interdisciplinary context to another without careful consideration of contextual features and interactions. While engineering education is similar to disciplines that have been studied (e.g., science and engineering), it is unique in that the researchers are often embedded in the field they are trying to impact (engineering) and integrate research approaches across fields that are cognitively divergent (e.g., engineering and sociology). Accordingly, the purpose of this work is to investigate the epistemic culture of engineering education research teams.

To meet this goal, we are conducting an ethnographic case study of a single engineering education research team (Team Y). Team Y is working on a multi-year, nationally funded project. The team members are located at multiple institutions across the United States and hold their weekly meetings virtually. We observed recordings of these virtual meetings that occurred across six months during 2023. At the time of our observations, the team had seven members that included engineering administrators, faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students from three different disciplines.

We are taking a topic-oriented approach to our ethnographic study, focusing on how Team Y navigates making research decisions. Our research process mirrors the steps defined by Spradley (1980) in his Developmental Research Sequence. Our work-in-progress paper will present a synthesized ethnographic description of Team Y’s research decision process that addresses two ethnographic questions: What values, goals, and feelings were expressed? and How do the actors engage with each other? The description is constructed from observations of two meetings in which the team is focusing on two different research decisions. We are synthesizing the description by identifying the core features of the two discussions and constructing our own research decision scenario that has core similarities to Team Y’s actual discussion. This approach will allow us to protect the identity of the team while still sharing the important features of the team’s navigation of their decisions. We will also present our analysis of the description using Longino’s Critical Contextual Empiricism framework that defines the norms for an idealized knowledge generating community. Through this analysis, we will describe Team Y’s epistemic culture based on their venues, uptake of critiques, standards, and intellectual equality.