2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this study, the author explores the professional academic identities of “teacher” and “researcher” as experienced by an engineering educator filling dual roles as graduate student and full-time academic faculty. Many who endeavor to teach engineering in higher education pursue doctoral degrees to obtain credentials required for their desired career. During their doctoral studies, some find the parts of themselves that want to be a “teacher” get set aside in favor of becoming a “researcher.” Identification with a profession, such as engineering, is shown to contribute to motivation, self-efficacy, and improved performance in those roles. Understanding how engineering graduate students experience their academic identity in both roles could be informative in improving educational outcomes for the students they will teach. The study aims to understand how professional identity influences a graduate student’s motivation to teach and how teaching practice reaffirms that professional identity. The research questions are: (1) What are the social and technical aspects of teacher and researcher identity as experienced by one engineering education graduate student? (2) What are the connections between identity and motivation as the student navigates these dual roles? An autoethnographic study design is used to explore the reflexive experiences of this student through two semesters of full-time teaching during the dissertation phase of a doctoral program. Existing studies of teacher identity in engineering graduate students tend to focus on teacher identity in isolation from researcher identity. Additionally, many of these studies take an etic viewpoint, that of an outsider to the phenomenon. Using an autoethnographic approach supports an emic, or insider, perspective of teacher identity. Data collected will mainly be in the form of reflective journaling by the autoethnographer, supplemented by digital artifacts such as emails, personal correspondence, lesson plans, research memos, and interviews. Theoretical frameworks utilized in this study include both the Identity-Based Motivational Theory and Teaching Dispositions In Action framework. Identity-based motivation provides a framework for data collection. The Dispositions framework operationalizes teacher identity as a set of responsive and technical repertoires of practice and will be used in data analysis. This study has recently launched, with data collection commencing Fall 2024. The paper will contribute to our understanding of what being a teacher means in engineering education. It is expected that the findings will show that the professional academic identities of teachers and researchers share more synergy than conflicts in both their social and technical aspects.