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Background: Shame is a deeply painful emotion people feel when they perceive that they have fallen short of socially constructed expectations. In this study, professional shame refers to shame experiences that stem from people's perceptions that they have failed to meet expectations or standards that are relevant to their identities in a professional domain. While socially constructed expectations placed on engineering students have been implicitly addressed in the engineering education literature, they have rarely been the subject of specific inquiry. Purpose: As part of a broader study on professional shame in engineering, we investigated the co‐construction of social worlds that place expectations on engineering students. Method: We conducted 10 ethnographic focus groups with undergraduate engineering students from two universities. These groups were either heterogeneous or homogeneous, regarding racial and gender identity, to examine multiple social realities. Results: We present significant findings related to engineering students' collective noticing, defining, and experiencing of social worlds. The findings give a sense of overlapping but distinct social realities among student groups and highlight how failing to meet expectations can contribute to deeply painful emotional responses. We also note when students' responses reproduce, resist, or redefine the broader cultural norms in which the students are embedded. Conclusions: The study has implications for the theoretical exploration of shame, engineering education research on identity and diversity and inclusion, and the messaging and interactions in which the engineering education community engages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a novel institutional change model, embodied in the Engineering Education Transformations Institute at the University of Georgia, that was intentionally designed to build community and expertise around scholarly teaching and learning in engineering education. The model is informed by several theoretical constructs, including complex systems theory, the propagation paradigm, a strengths perspective, and ecological design principles. The goals of this paper are twofold. First, we introduce these theoretical constructs and describe how they inform both the organisational structure and day-to-day operations of the Institute. Second, drawing on data collected using ethnographic methods and a thinking with theory analytical approach, we share two practice examples that demonstrate some of the opportunities and challenges associated with our institutional change efforts. The first example shows how our Institute's programming enabled a teaching-focused faculty member to connect with others in our college in ways that dramatically enhanced his existing STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) outreach efforts to a local, resource-constrained high school. The second example demonstrates how complex systems theory and ecological design principles can be used to both create the conditions for scholarly teaching, learning, and research in engineering education, and provide a set of theoretical perspectives through which to better understand and solve challenges that arise in collaborative, educational research and practice settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empathy is an important professional skill for engineers. Defined as the capacity to understand and share the feelings of others, empathy can help engineers work on teams and interact more effectively with clients. Approaches designed to teach empathy to engineering students, however, are limited, as are studies on such interventions. This study investigated two research questions: What mental models about engineering and engineering relationships do students bring with them into engineering classrooms? And, how do these mental models impact students' engagement with and understanding of empathic communication exercises? Data for the study included student reflections from second-year mechanical engineering students (n = 36 x 4 reflections each, one for each of the four empathic communication modules). The findings comprised five themes from a cross-section of the data at one point in the semester and narrative trajectories that capture the experiences of two students across all four modules. The findings suggest that learning about empathy in engineering can call into question the mental models students bring with them about what engineering is and what engineers do. Instructors need to be aware of the challenges associated with confronting these pre-existing understandings and attend to them in the design, implementation, and assessment of empathy-related activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Background: Prior to undertaking studies involving human subjects, engineering education researchers are required to consider the ethical implications of their work by obtaining approval from an ethical review board. Purpose/Hypothesis: Recent research suggests that some unintended consequences of this procedure are that it externalizes and inflexibly formalizes ethical considerations, and limits researchers’ readiness to systematically identify and consider ethical questions that arise while conducting research. Design/Method: We used a collaborative inquiry approach to examine such ethically important moments that emerged in two of our interpretive research projects. We drew on Walther, Sochacka, and Kellam's framework for interpretive research quality as the departure point for our shared sense‐making process. Results: Our explorations revealed two insights that connect research ethics to research quality in novel ways. First, we found that the quality of our work improved when we critically explored the intersections between our motivations and intentions for investigating particular research topics and broader cultural agendas and assumptions. Second, we found that when we actively sought to do justice to the participants, co‐investigators, and readers of our research, we were afforded with opportunities to increase the quality of our work, in sometimes quite unexpected ways. Conclusions: We synthesized the findings from our collaborative inquiry into a process‐oriented model for ethical validation, which we propose as a sixth construct to our prior five‐construct framework for interpretive research quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The field of engineering education research is adopting an increasingly diverse range of qualitative methods. These developments necessitate a coherent language and conceptual framework to critically engage with questions of qualitative research quality. Purpose/Hypothesis: This article advances discussions of qualitative research quality through sharing and analyzing a methodologically diverse, practice‐based exploration of research quality in the context of five engineering education research studies. Design/Method: As a group of seven engineering education researchers, we drew on the collaborative inquiry method to systematically examine questions of qualitative research quality in our everyday research practice. We used a process‐based, theoretical framework for research quality as the anchor for these explorations. Results: We constructed five practice explorations spanning grounded theory, interpretative phenomenological analysis, and various forms of narrative inquiry. Examining the individual contributions as a whole yielded four key insights: quality challenges require examination from multiple theoretical lenses; questions of research quality are implicitly infused in research practice; research quality extends beyond the objects, procedures, and products of research to concern the human context and local research setting; and research quality lies at the heart of introducing novices to interpretive research. Conclusions: This study demonstrates the potential and further need for the engineering education community to advance methodological theory through purposeful and reflective engagement in research practice across the diverse methodological approaches currently being adopted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background The field of engineering education research is adopting an increasingly diverse range of qualitative methods. These developments necessitate a coherent language and conceptual framework to critically engage with questions of qualitative research quality. Purpose/Hypothesis This article advances discussions of qualitative research quality through sharing and analyzing a methodologically diverse, practice-based exploration of research quality in the context of five engineering education research studies. Design/Method As a group of seven engineering education researchers, we drew on the collaborative inquiry method to systematically examine questions of qualitative research quality in our everyday research practice. We used a process-based, theoretical framework for research quality as the anchor for these explorations. Results We constructed five practice explorations spanning grounded theory, interpretative phenomenological analysis and various forms of narrative inquiry. Examining the individual contributions as a whole yielded four key insights: quality challenges require examination from multiple theoretical lenses; questions of research quality are implicitly infused in research practice; research quality extends beyond the objects, procedures and products of research to concern the human context and local research setting; and research quality lies at the heart of introducing novices to interpretive research. Conclusions This study demonstrates the potential and further need for the engineering education community to advance methodological theory through purposeful and reflective engagement in research practice across the diverse methodological approaches currently being adopted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We came to collaborative autoethnography quite by accident. In this methodological paper, we consider our experiences as we embraced a new methodology, taught and researched collaboratively in an interdisciplinary space, and grappled with how we might nestle our work in a journal with no history of publishing autoethnographies--all while becoming awakened to critiques against and arguments for autoethnographic research. Our discussions are presented along with portions of our lengthy e-mail correspondences written during our research process and center on two prominent facets of our research experience: interdisciplinarity and the research process. Entangled in our methodological unpacking, we highlight "Productive Tensions" that emerged from both our collaboration and reviewer feedback that is presented alongside our discussion. Through seeing these tensions as productive, we argue that embracing diverse perspectives can serve to strengthen the depth of engagement, quality, and potential impact of (collaborative) autoethnographic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background There is a growing interest in STEAM (STEM + the Arts) education as a means to enhance the creativity of STEM students and broaden interest in STEM fields. Many art educators, however, object to the instrumental justification for study in the arts as a way to improve student performance in other areas. Purpose Drawing on the first two authors' engagement in an interdisciplinary design studio, this study develops an expanded view of how STEAM might enrich engineering education in ways that more closely align with the pedagogical commitments of the arts. Design/Method This article is written as a collaborative autoethnography between the first two authors, educators in environmental engineering and art education, respectively. The study is grounded in the educational philosophy of arts advocate Maxine Greene, who views learning as an active, collaborative search for meaning, 'wide-awakeness,' and social change. Results Our dialogue reveals the potential for STEAM to provide students and educators with opportunities to explore personally relevant connections between materials, design, society, and the natural environment and to critically engage with implicit and explicit facets of disciplinary identity. Conclusions This view of STEAM simultaneously complements and challenges current conceptions of this emerging educational movement that, almost without exception, are underpinned by calls for competitive economic growth and technological development. We hope future research will build on our perspectives to continue a conversation about STEAM that considers the diverse contributions of, and mutual benefits to, all parties involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background The emerging discipline of engineering education research is increasingly embracing a diverse range of interpretive research methods, whose adoption is characterized by a lack of coherent ways to conceptualize, communicate, and judge the quality of interpretive inquiries. Yet fields that have traditionally employed these methods do not offer a consensus about research quality. Purpose This article presents reflections on challenges to research quality in an example interpretive engineering education study, and offers a quality framework that emerged from this study as a coherent, discipline-specific view on interpretive research quality. Design/Method Analysis of the prior study of engineering students' competency formation by the author(s) is combined with a synthesis of the literature from the broad intellectual traditions of the interpretive paradigm to inform the development of a theoretical framework of research quality. Results Drawing on the engineering metaphor of quality management, we propose a systematic, process-oriented framework of research quality along two dimensions: a process model locates quality strategies throughout the research process, and a typology systemizes fundamental aspects of validation (theoretical, procedural, communicative, and pragmatic) and the concept of process reliability to explicate quality strategies in their fundamental contribution to substantiating knowledge claims. Conclusion The quality framework provides a way to develop and demonstrate overall research quality in the interpretive inquiry by shifting attention away from assessing the research quality of a final product. Rather, the framework provides guidance to systematically document and explicitly demonstrate quality considerations throughout the entire research process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resilience is an important life skill that most students need to overcome setbacks caused by academically adverse factors. However, engineering educators mostly only focus on supporting students to develop cognitive or technical skills. This article introduces academic resilience as a theoretical framework to investigate how students respond to academic challenges in engineering, and the relevance of the framework to research in engineering education. In this article, we discussed basic tenets of educational resilience research and suggest ways in which resilience research could advance existing areas of research within engineering education. Lastly, we provided an example to illustrate how a focus on resilience framework informed the way we conceptualised an exploratory research study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The engineering education discourse increasingly recognizes the role of empathy in preparing students for 21st century challenges. This pedagogical and theoretical interest is not supported by an empirical understanding of the role empathy plays in students' professional formation. Purpose This study investigated how undergraduate engineering students made sense of empathy during a series of empathic communication modules as part of a mechanical engineering design course. Methodology: Post‐module reflections from 146 students were collected in two iterations of the course. The data were qualitatively analyzed using social phenomenology to focus on participants' meaning making in the context of their overall experiences. A model of empathy as interrelated skills, orientations, and ways of being theoretically framed the data gathering and analysis. Findings Three analytic categories structured the significant variation in students' meaning making. (a) Relationships with Others captured students' understandings of the relationship with and role of others along the three dimensions of Distance, Difference, and Power. (b) The Act of Learning identified varying degrees of resonance or disconnect between students' expectations of engineering learning and the forms of learning encountered in the modules. (c) Empathy as a Conceptual Object described the variation of students' own understandings of the nature and function of empathy in the context of their engineering learning. Conclusions: The experiential significance of engaging with empathy makes visible and pedagogically accessible students' value orientations that frame their relationships toward others and their self‐understanding as engineers, thus providing potential new avenues for research and education to engage less tangible facets of engineering formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Engineers are increasingly being asked to empathically engage with a broad range of stakeholders. Current efforts to educate empathic engineers, however, are hindered by the lack of a conceptually cohesive understanding of, and language for, applying empathy to engineering. Prior studies have suggested that research informed by long-standing traditions in other fields may provide the rigor, conceptual clarity, and expertise necessary to theoretically ground the education and practice of empathy in technical disciplines. Purpose This study examined three research questions: What are current understandings of empathy in engineering and engineering education? How do these understandings compare with conceptions of empathy in social work, a professional discipline that defines empathy as a core skill and orientation of its practitioners? What can engineering educators learn from social work to inform the education of empathic engineers? Scope/Method This article presents the findings from a sustained, four-year, interdisciplinary dialogue between engineering education and social work education researchers. This effort included an examination of productive tensions and similarities between the two fields, a critical synthesis of the literature on empathy in each discipline, and the development of a context-appropriate model for empathy in engineering. Conclusions We propose a model of empathy in engineering as a teachable and learnable skill, a practice orientation, and a professional way of being. Expanding conceptions of empathy in social work, this model additionally emphasizes mode switching and a commitment to values pluralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Although prior research has provided robust descriptions of engineering students' identity development, a gap in the literature exists related to students' emotional experiences of shame, which undergird the socially constructed expectations of their professional formation. Purpose We examined the lived experiences of professional shame among White male engineering students in the United States. We conceptualize professional shame to be a painful emotional state that occurs when one perceives they have failed to meet socially constructed expectations or standards that are relevant to their identity in a professional domain. Method: We conducted unstructured interviews with nine White male engineering students from both a research‐focused institution and a teaching‐focused institution. We used interpretative phenomenological analysis to examine the interview transcripts. Results: The findings demonstrated four themes related to how participants experienced professional shame. First, they negotiated their global, or holistic, identities in the engineering domain. Second, they experienced threats to their identities within professional contexts. Third, participants responded to threats in ways that gave prominence to the standards they perceived themselves to have failed. Finally, they repaired their identities through reframing shame experiences and seeking social connection. Conclusions: The findings demonstrate that the professional shame phenomenon is interwoven with professional identity development. In experiencing professional shame, White male students might reproduce the shame experience for themselves and others. This finding has important implications for the standards against which members from underrepresented groups may compare themselves and provides insight into the social construction of engineering cultures by dominant groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]