2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

With the U.S. National Science Foundation’s emphasis on convergence research as one of their ten big ideas for future investment, more researchers explicitly acknowledge the value of convergence research. Yet, many also report that they have difficulty in creating educational programs that help new generations of researchers learn convergence research. Focusing on data from ethnographic interviews with an interdisciplinary cohort of engineering graduate students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, this paper argues that one major barrier to initiating sustainable convergence training programs in STEM education is the challenge of incorporating the experiences of the ‘convergence researchers’ into a transdisciplinary framework. Within the dominant culture of academic research, at least in engineering fields in the U.S., convergence research is often seen as the process of conjoining two or more established academic disciplines. By highlighting the embodied, relational, and often improvisational aspects of convergence research, the interviewed graduate students drew our attention to the need to address experiential processes embedded in transdisciplinary processes in addition to academic outputs that come out of these processes. Our study proposes a framework that considers 'feedback flows' to be the driving force behind convergence research without restricting the form or source of that feedback. This framework can be organically built by centering the experiential knowledge of the convergence researcher.