2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

CAREER: “There is no I in team”: The role of individuals in facilitating a culture primed for epistemic negotiation

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session I

Engineering education is an interdisciplinary discipline that strives to transform engineering by integrating research and practice. These efforts require teams of individuals from different fields (e.g., engineering, sociology, psychology) and roles within a university (e.g., faculty, support staff, administration). Each of these team members bring their own values, goals, training, and knowledge into the team. The integration of these differences in thinking are key to making transformative change in engineering; however, they can create tensions and prevent progress. These tensions are often attributed to ineffective communication or project management, which overlooks the differences in how individuals from different backgrounds approach research and the application of research to practice – epistemic differences. The goal of this project is to explore how research teams navigate epistemic differences and engage in critical conversations to make research decisions.

This paper will summarize key findings from the third year of an NSF CAREER project, which focused on analyzing data from semi-structured interviews with scholars who have experience on various engineering education research teams. Our data includes 60-to-90-minute interviews with 10 scholars. These scholars include tenured faculty, pre-tenure faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate student researchers from engineering education, computer science education, and psychology. We analyzed the transcripts using approaches from constructivist grounded theory. Our analysis was guided by two sensitizing concepts, Epistemic Identity and Critical Contextual Empiricism, along with our preliminary model of epistemic culture developed through an ethnographic case study. Combined, these theories and preliminary model allowed us to explore how individuals contribute to the culture of a team. In this paper, we will highlight two core findings from our analysis: (1) how individuals present themselves has a major impact on a team, especially when that individual is in a position of power and (2) the effects of individuals who embrace a posture of epistemic humility can support epistemic negotiation. Combined these two findings suggest that to support epistemic negotiation on teams, individuals, especially those in a position of power, should embrace epistemic humility to encourage the integration of ideas. Furthermore, this finding offers a means for individuals to independently impact team culture.

Authors

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

Lorna Treffert is a 3rd year Ph.D. candidate in Engineering Education at the University at Buffalo. She recieved her bachelors and masters in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Tennessee - Knoxville. Her research interests include exploring the structural and interpersonal factors which promote intellectual risk taking within engineering and engineering education contexts.
Dr. Danielle Vegas Lewis http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7266-6328 University at Buffalo [biography]

Dr. Danielle Vegas Lewis is currently a Postdoctoral Associate 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.
Aaron Livingston Alexander University at Buffalo, The State University of New York [biography]

Aaron is a fourth-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.
Ms. Isabel Anne Boyd http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6244-9335 Georgia Institute of Technology [biography]

Isabel is a rising third year Ph.D. student in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. She has conducted several mixed-methods and qualitative research projects centered around diversity and inclusion in engineering and is passionate about engineering education.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026

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