2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

TITLE: Exploring the Connection Between Positioning Theory and Educator Experiences
Stephanie Cutler and Alexandra Coso Strong (2023) bring attention to how engineering education research often focuses on the impact of educators on students but not the social identities of the educators. These identities can and likely do inform their work. Cutler and Coso Strong also point out the variation among those who educate in engineering (tenured/tenure-track faculty, graduate students, and contingent/adjunct faculty), which is not always acknowledged. By not paying attention to such variation, the impact of work done in engineering education research may be limited. In an effort to illuminate these variations, we report on research that explores some details of the educator experience. In this paper we ask: what does it look like to be an educator working to adapt an existing curriculum for a new term, in our case a curriculum previously taught in Autumn 2021 and adapted for use in Winter 2022? Broadly, the curriculum was a 10-week seminar titled Dear Design: Defining Your Ideal Design Signature where students explored multiple elements of the design process and had the opportunity to discover their ideal design signature. During the delivery of the seminar, the education team wrote weekly reflections to capture their adaptation experiences. Using qualitative methods, we analyzed the education team’s structured reflections. The thematic analysis resulted in three emergent themes: 1) I thought this would be easier, 2) acting on values, and 3) teaching as an educational journey. We discuss these themes in light of positioning theory and the norms that early career instructors may find themselves working within.