2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this work-in-progress research paper, we demonstrate early insights of our constructivist grounded theory investigation into the emotional experiences of engineering faculty and their surrounding academic cultures of well-being. We situate this paper in a broader series of studies in which we aim to advance well-being by understanding the professional shame experiences of engineering faculty. We refer to professional shame as a painful emotion that occurs when someone fails to meet cultural expectations in a professional setting. We understand professional shame to be both an emotion internalized by faculty and a cultural experience that they help contribute to in their behavior by constructing expectations in engineering. While prior literature has often left implications for faculty behaviors, it has rarely sought to understand their emotional needs. In this study, we aim to characterize the link between faculty’s emotional experience and their surrounding academic cultures of well-being. Specifically, we aim to understand the role that professional shame has on faculty and how this impacts their academic culture.

Accordingly, the research questions of this paper are: (1) How do faculty experience professional shame? (2) How do faculty behave in ways that might affect the shame experiences of students? (3) How do cultures of well-being in engineering education relate to faculty’s shame experiences?

To answer our research questions, we used mixed qualitative research methods. Specifically, we conducted interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) on ten interview transcripts to generate insights into individual lived experiences of professional shame in engineering faculty. In the present study, we focus on the connection between study participants’ lived emotional experiences within the surrounding cultural engineering context using constructivist grounded theory (CGT). We are analyzing twenty interviews with faculty members from three universities to elicit their lived experiences as engineering faculty. Thus, we are attentive to the individual experiences reflected in the interviews and shared accounts of three institutional cultures. We have completed in-depth initial coding of each interview and will use constant comparison to create a relevant abstraction of the interview data. We then use our initial codes as a basis to conduct focused coding, which, alongside the IPA study, will allow us to develop a coherent focus on theoretical patterns from the data. Through our grounded theory analysis, we will produce a theoretical model that defines the connection between the emotional regulation of engineering faculty and the academic cultures that embed them.

In the ASEE presentation, we will share preliminary insights based on our initial codes of the interview data that give insights into the connection between faculty emotions and the cultures around them. With the theoretical model, we aim to make visible how faculty participate in constructing dominant narratives in engineering education concerning their emotion regulation. Further, the CGT model will highlight the power of positively improving strategies for improving emotion regulation in faculty. Lastly, we will use the study's outcomes to provide academic leadership with guidelines to enhance well-being in engineering education by caring for faculty members who influence the system.