2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this Lessons Learned paper, we report on an ongoing effort to build a community of practice among faculty who are exploring, or transitioning to, new research areas within engineering and engineering education. This effort is taking place at a small, primarily-undergraduate institution (PUI) in the northeastern United States, and is part of a broader institutional effort to increase our faculty's capacity to do impactful research through interdisciplinary exploration and collaboration. Our work is motivated by an increasing emphasis on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work in engineering practice, and on complex, systemic problems that require broad collaboration to address. While faculty are interested in broadening their research horizons to address problems that they find meaningful to work on, finding sufficient support, bandwidth, and mentorship to explore a new field is difficult, particularly at small PUIs where a faculty may be the only person doing research in a specific discipline.

To help faculty transition to new research areas, we are seeding an effort to build a community of practice among our faculty that will help sustain these types of research explorations or transitions in future faculty members. Specifically, we supported a small amount of formal training in new areas for some faculty, and established a series of small (3-4 members) peer mentoring groups called "brain trusts" that are modeled after Wenger's communities of practice framework. Each group's members span diverse programs, majors, or areas, but members share the common bond of making a foray or transition into a new research area (joint enterprise). Each group meets regularly, and meetings consist of one member presenting artifacts from their new research area, including data, paper drafts, or grant proposals, while other members critique these artifacts (mutual engagement). Through this practice of interdisciplinary critique, we have developed a rich exchange of ideas and disciplinary paradigms, as well as a set of evolving best practices that help support our development in new research areas (shared repertoire). Our paper will share further details from this practice.

This paper also serves as a collective reflective analysis, exploring how we ourselves make sense of how this experience has shaped our faculty careers and professional development. Through methods drawn and adapted from collaborative autoethnography, we analyze various outcomes of our community of practice, including our research output, collaborations within and outside the institution, student involvement, the resources required to start and sustain this effort, and our perceived self-efficacy in these newfound research areas. We conclude with recommendations on best practices that we hope will help other faculty adapt these communities at their own institutions.

We prefer to present this paper as a lightning talk.