2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

CAREER: Basics Matter: The Role of Space and Documents in Supporting Critical Conversations and Inclusion on an NSF Funded Engineering Education Research Group

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session II

Engineering education strives to transform the field of engineering by integrating research and practice. These efforts often involve groups of individuals from fields such as engineering, sociology, and psychology and from different roles within a university (e.g., faculty, administration, student support staff). Each of these team members bring their own approaches to the generation, expression, and application of knowledge. These differences in thinking are key to the success of engineering education; however, they can create tensions that prevent many groups from achieving their core goals. These tensions are often associated with ineffective communication or project management, which overlook the more fundamental differences around what counts as knowledge and how knowledge is generated – epistemic differences. The goal of this project is to explore how research teams navigate these epistemic differences and engage in critical conversations to make research decisions. This paper will summarize our key findings from the second year of our NSF CAREER project, which focused on analyzing ethnographic data collected from one research team. Our data included 13 recorded team meetings (approximately 15 hours of data) and transcripts from interviews with 7 team members. From the recorded team meetings, we generated detailed fieldnotes and analyzed the data to understand the team’s epistemic culture through inductive coding and memo writing. Our analysis was guided by two theoretical frameworks: Critical Contextual Empiricism and Epistemic Identity. Together these frameworks allowed us to explore the team’s culture from both the group and individual levels. In this paper, we will highlight one core finding from our analysis: the importance of the space and the documents the team uses during meetings. These two features support critical conversations and allow all team members to participate in the conversation.

Authors

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

Lorna Treffert is a 1st year Ph.D. student in the Theory and Practice in Teacher Education Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She holds both a BS and MS in Industrial and Systems Engineering. Her research interests include facilitating diversity and inclusion within engineering education and applications of operations research in an education context.
Dr. Danielle V. Lewis http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7266-6328 University at Buffalo [biography]

Dr. Danielle Vegas Lewis is currently the Postdoctoral Associate in Dr. Courtney Faber's ENLITE lab in the Department of Engineering Education at the University at Buffalo. Her research agenda aims to understand and disrupt the ways in which socially constructed identities allow for the reproduction of social inequality, with a focus on understanding the ways institutions of higher education and other social structures challenge or uphold hegemonic environments in which majority populations accumulate power that harms students underrepresented in certain contexts.
Ms. Isabel Anne Boyd http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6244-9335 Georgia Institute of Technology [biography]

Isabel is a first year Ph.D. student in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. She has conducted several mixed-methods research projects centered around diversity and inclusion in engineering and is passionate about engineering education.
Aaron Livingston Alexander University at Buffalo, The State University of New York [biography]

Aaron is a third-year undergraduate student at the University at Buffalo working towards his Bachelor's of Science in Electrical Engineering. He has assisted in several qualitative research projects during his time at the university. Aaron also serves as a student ambassador of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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