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1. Developing a Model of Professional Agency Toward Change in Engineering Education for Early Career Scholars

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--34416  

   Faber, Courtney ; Lee, Walter ; Strong, Alexandra ; Bodnar, Cheryl ; Smith-Orr, Courtney ; McCave, Erin ( June 2020 , 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   As the field of engineering education continues to evolve, the number of early career scholars who identify as members of the discipline will continue to increase. These engineering education scholars will need to take strategic and intentional actions towards their professional goals and the goals of the engineering education community to be impactful within their positions. In other words, they must exercise agency. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to investigate how the agency of early career, engineering education scholars manifests across different contexts. Our overarching research question is: How do institutional, individual, and disciplinary field and societal features influence early career engineering education faculty member’s agency to impact engineering education in their particular positions? To investigate how faculty agency manifests across different contexts, we adopted a longitudinal research approach to focus on our own experiences as engineering education scholars. Due to the complexity of the phenomenon, more common approaches to qualitative research (e.g., interviews, surveys, etc.) were unlikely to illuminate the manifestation of agency, which requires capturing the nuances associated with one’s day-to-day experiences. Thus, to address our research purpose, we required a research design that provided a space to explore one’s acceptance of ambiguity, responses to disappointments, willingness to adapt, process of adapting, and experiences with collaboration. The poster presented will provide a preliminary version of the model along with a detailed description of the methods used to develop it. In short, we integrated collaborative inquiry and collaborative autoethnography as a means for building our model. Autoethnography is a research approach that critically examines personal experience to explore a cultural phenomenon. Collaborative autoethnography, which leverages collective sense-making of the data, informed the structure of our data collection. Specifically, we documented our individual experiences over the course of six semesters by (1) completing weekly, monthly, pre-semester, and post-semester reflection questions; (2) participating in periodic activities and discussions focused on targeted areas of our theoretical framework and relevant literature; and (3) discussing the outcomes from both (1) and (2) in weekly meetings. Collaborative inquiry, in contrast to collaborative autoethnography, is a research approach where people pair reflection on practice with action through multiple inquiry cycles. Collaborative inquiry guided the topics of discussion within our weekly meetings and how we approached challenges and other aspects of our positions. The combination of these methodologies allowed us to deeply and systematically explore our own experiences, allowing us to develop a model of professional agency towards change in engineering education through collaborative sense-making. By sharing our findings with current and developing engineering education graduate programs, we will enable them to make programmatic changes to benefit current and future engineering education scholars. These findings also will provide a mechanism for divisions within ASEE to develop programming and resources to support the sustained success and impact of their members. 

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2. Qualitative Research Quality: A Collaborative Inquiry Across Multiple Methodological Perspectives

   https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20170  

   Walther, Joachim ; Sochacka, Nicola W. ; Benson, Lisa C. ; Bumbaco, Amy E. ; Kellam, Nadia ; Pawley, Alice L. ; Phillips, Canek M. L. ( July 2017 , Journal of Engineering Education)

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

    

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3. Researcher positionality in linguistics: Lessons from undergraduate experiences in community‐centered collaborative research

   https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12495  

   Bucholtz, Mary ; Campbell, Eric W. ; Cevallos, Teresa ; Cruz, Veronica ; Fawcett, Alexia Z. ; Guerrero, Bethany ; Lydon, Katie ; Mendoza, Inî G. ; Peters, Simon L. ; Reyes Basurto, Griselda ( June 2023 , Language and Linguistics Compass)

   Researcher positionality has come into focus in a number of fields, as scholars increasingly acknowledge the impact of their lived experiences and identities on all aspects of the research process. In most areas of linguistics, however, researcher positionality remains underdiscussed, even as many linguists from dominant groups conduct research on the language of subordinated groups without community self‐determination regarding the research direction and goals. While the growing emphasis on collaborative community‐centered research overcomes some inequities, another key step toward a more inclusive linguistics is the involvement of undergraduate researchers who are members of the partner community or whose backgrounds, experiences, and identities overlap with those of community members. Such undergraduate team members can contribute special insight and knowledge to the research. This article describes the role of a mostly Latinx team of undergraduate research interns in a community language maintenance survey project as part of a collaboration between a Hispanic Serving Institution and a nonprofit organization supporting the Mexican Indigenous community on California’s Central Coast. Undergraduate interns strengthened the project by drawing connections between their own linguistic experiences and those of the survey respondents, thus enabling the research team to better support community goals. The article concludes with recommendations for centering researcher positionality in linguistics in order to produce more inclusive, just, and rigorous linguistic science.

    

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4. Developing Methodologies for Co-Production of Knowledge: Data Production and Analysis in Community-Based Research Partnerships

   https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004241227268  

   Shea, Molly Victoria ( February 2024 , Qualitative Inquiry)

   This article reports on the development of a local methodological innovation that supports the co-production of knowledge side-by-side with community-based research partners. In addition to conducting critical ethnography, Shea reports on how educators within an after-school community science program and a researcher developed practices to surface community educators’ values, demystify the data analysis process, conduct collective analysis, and produce critical layers of data through storytelling. The discussion offers scholars interested in co-producing knowledge an imagination for how to revise existing and taken-for-granted research practices to shift knowledge production.

    

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5. Lessons Learned About Designing and Conducting Studies From HRI Experts

   https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2021.772141  

   Fraune, Marlena R. ; Leite, Iolanda ; Karatas, Nihan ; Amirova, Aida ; Legeleux, Amélie ; Sandygulova, Anara ; Neerincx, Anouk ; Dilip Tikas, Gaurav ; Gunes, Hatice ; Mohan, Mayumi ; et al ( January 2022 , Frontiers in Robotics and AI)

   The field of human-robot interaction (HRI) research is multidisciplinary and requires researchers to understand diverse fields including computer science, engineering, informatics, philosophy, psychology, and more disciplines. However, it is hard to be an expert in everything. To help HRI researchers develop methodological skills, especially in areas that are relatively new to them, we conducted a virtual workshop, Workshop Your Study Design (WYSD), at the 2021 International Conference on HRI. In this workshop, we grouped participants with mentors, who are experts in areas like real-world studies, empirical lab studies, questionnaire design, interview, participatory design, and statistics. During and after the workshop, participants discussed their proposed study methods, obtained feedback, and improved their work accordingly. In this paper, we present 1) Workshop attendees’ feedback about the workshop and 2) Lessons that the participants learned during their discussions with mentors. Participants’ responses about the workshop were positive, and future scholars who wish to run such a workshop can consider implementing their suggestions. The main contribution of this paper is the lessons learned section, where the workshop participants contributed to forming this section based on what participants discovered during the workshop. We organize lessons learned into themes of 1) Improving study design for HRI, 2) How to work with participants - especially children -, 3) Making the most of the study and robot’s limitations, and 4) How to collaborate well across fields as they were the areas of the papers submitted to the workshop. These themes include practical tips and guidelines to assist researchers to learn about fields of HRI research with which they have limited experience. We include specific examples, and researchers can adapt the tips and guidelines to their own areas to avoid some common mistakes and pitfalls in their research. 

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