2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineers and engineering educators must communicate effectively across a range of genres, situations, and professional contexts, including industry, policy- and decision-making, and academic settings. Developing these abilities means producing the “disciplinary conventions of writing in one’s field” (Lin, 2022), which are taught across contexts in a variety of ways (Cunningham, 2019; Lala et al., 2018; Mehrubeoglu et al., 2023; Russell et al., 2024). Although studies demonstrate that engineering communication instruction is valued, these studies focus on training students to communicate in technical engineering disciplinary contexts. Few studies have examined how doctoral students in Engineering Education (EEd) develop competencies for communicating engineering education research (EER). EER’s study designs, methods, theories, and communication styles diverge from those in technical engineering disciplines, aligning more closely with the social sciences (Klassen & Case, 2022), fields to which many students (and, perhaps, faculty) have had less prior exposure or formal training. As a result, writing proposals and papers and developing presentations for EER represents a shift in the expected communication skills and literacies needed to be successful. Additionally, for EER PhD students, gaining acceptance and recognition as an EER researcher—part of developing a researcher identity—requires adapting and developing the skills, competencies and conventions for making meaning they learned in technical domains to engage successfully with and navigate the new epistemological frameworks used to make meaning in EER. Because understanding of these frameworks is demonstrated in writing and presentations, researchers must write, and developing a researcher identity includes incorporating a writer identity as well. This paper presents and analyzes a case study of one EER graduate program’s efforts to support its PhD students in transitioning to the academic conventions of EER communication and writing. We document how we, a team of writing studies experts, leveraged our expertise in academic literacies (Lea & Street, 2006; Lin, 2022), rhetoric (Paretti et al., 2014) and genre analysis (Berdanier, 2019) to establish a communication-focused community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) in an EER PhD program at a large, mid-western university. By documenting this project in its pilot phase and the role of our unique expertise in its development, we hope to achieve two goals: 1.) to encourage other EER programs to address and explore the specific challenges and needs of students transitioning from engineering technical domain undergraduate programs to EER graduate programs; 2.) to demonstrate how EER programs can leverage expertise of faculty from writing studies and technical communication to develop evidence-based practices that support students’ transition.