2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Work-In-Progress: How an Engineering Education Research Team’s Culture Impacts the Undergraduate Research Experience

Presented at Student Division Technical Session 1: Student Experiences and Support

In this work-in-progress paper, we took an ethnographic approach to explore the knowledge generating culture of an engineering education research team. We focused particularly on how and when undergraduate students engage in research activities and what actions by the faculty encourage this engagement. Our data consists of five recorded team research meetings conducted over Zoom. We used Spradley’s Developmental Research Sequence (1980) to guide our ethnographic observations and analysis. That is, we first took field notes on those five meetings, developed a grand tour of the key components of the teams culture, analyzed the relationships between those components using a domain analysis, and finally organized those domains into a taxonomy informed by Amy Allen’s conception of Power. We found that faculty members can use their “power-over” undergraduate students to their benefit by ensuring that it is used to share knowledge with the undergraduate students (“power-with”). We also found that faculty members can share “power-with” undergraduate students by legitimizing their efforts and therefore further encouraging their engagement. Finally, we found that students are also able to share “power-with” the team by contributing meaningfully to the team’s project..

Authors

Lorna Treffert University at Buffalo, The State University of New York [biography]

Lorna Treffert is a 2nd year Ph.D. student in the Engineering Education Department at the University at Buffalo. She holds both a BS and MS in Industrial and Systems Engineering. Her research interests include facilitating diversity and inclusion within engineering education, helping create authentic research experiences for undergraduate researchers, and applications of operations research in an education context.
Dr. Courtney June Faber http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9156-7616 University at Buffalo, The State University of New York [biography]

Courtney Faber, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Engineering Education at the University at Buffalo (UB). Prior to joining UB in August of 2023, she was a Research Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in Engineering Fundamentals at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She was also the Director of the Fundamentals of Engineering and Computing Teaching in Higher Education Certificate Program. Her research focuses on empowering engineering education scholars to be more effective at impacting transformational change in engineering and developing educational experiences that consider epistemic thinking. She develops and uses innovative research methods that allow for deep investigations of constructs such as epistemic thinking, identity, and agency. Dr. Faber has a B.S. in Bioengineering and a Ph.D. in Engineering and Science Education from Clemson University and a M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Cornell University. Among other awards for her research, she was awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2022 to study epistemic negotiations on interdisciplinary engineering education research teams.
Ms. Isabel Anne Boyd http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6244-9335 University of Tennessee, Knoxville [biography]

Isabel recently graduated from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville earning her Bachelor's of Science in Biomedical Engineering with Honors. She has assisted with several qualitative and mixed-methods research projects centered around diversity and inclusion in engineering. She will begin a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering with a focus on Engineering Education at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Fall 2024.

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