2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 259: Engineering Faculty Members’ Experience of Professional Shame: Summary of Insights from Year Three

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

In this paper, we provide an overview of an NSF CAREER project where we seek to advance academic well-being by understanding how engineering faculty experience and reproduce experiences of professional shame. After conducting non-standardized interviews with engineering faculty (n = 23), we use interpretative phenomenological analysis to examine select individual cases (n = 10) that illustrate poignant individual experiences of professional shame. In this paper, we summarize three cases to demonstrate the complexity and function of professional shame in the interior world of faculty members.

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 University of Pittsburgh [biography]

Dr. Amy Brooks is a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering. Her dissertation research broadly focused on global issues related to sustainable waste management and plastic pollution. After earning her PhD 2021 from the University of Georgia, Amy developed skills in qualitative research methods in engineering education at Oregon State University. As part of this training, she used interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to examine engineering faculty well-being and collaborated on the development of a reflective tool for researchers to build skills in semi- and unstructured interviewing. Building on her postdoctoral training, Amy aims to merge her methodological interests to pursue research questions in the nexus of engineering education, sustainable development, and resilient communities.
Julianna R Beehn Harding University [biography]

Julianna Beehn is a student majoring in Cognitive Neuroscience at Harding University. She is on track to graduate from the Honors College with distinction in 2025.
Olivia I Bell Harding University
Chelsei Lasha Arnold Harding University

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