2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Establishing a Culture of Trust within Interdisciplinary Engineering Education Research Teams

Presented at Minorities in Engineering Division(MIND) Technical Session 13

Working on teams with a range of disciplines and life experiences can help engineering education researchers generate novel approaches to DEIJ work. However, in order for teams draw from this wealth of knowledge and experience, individual team members must feel confident in their ability to take intellectual risks (e.g. sharing ideas, asking questions) without risk of embarrassment, rejection, exploitation, or punishment (i.e. feeling psychologically safe). Groups with high levels of psychological safety often experience a shared sense of responsibility, high-quality decision making, healthy group dynamics, and greater innovation. In this paper, we took an exploratory ethnographic approach to study the culture a of single, interdisciplinary research team working to promote equity in engineering education. This team includes members with a wide range of disciplines, social identities, and academic positions (e.g. faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students). In this study of this team, we addressed two research questions: 1) What are the beliefs held by individuals which impact their willingness to engage in intellectual risk taking on an interdisciplinary EER team? 2) How do the members of an interdisciplinary EER team foster a culture of trust and psychological safety? We identified three beliefs which influenced how team members engaged in intellectual risk taking related to: conceptual or methodological expertise, professional or academic position, and discomfort with their own positionality. We also identified three ways this team facilitated a sense of psychological safety. As we continue this work and study other research groups, we will develop interview questions to further explore the role psychological safety plays in how and why individuals engage in intellectual risk taking.

Authors

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

Lorna Treffert is a 2nd year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Engineering Education at SUNY Buffalo. She holds both a BS and MS in Industrial and Systems Engineering. Her research interests include studying power dynamics within engineering research teams, and facilitating diversity and inclusion within engineering education.
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.
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.
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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