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1. Audio Dissemination for Qualitative and Broadening Participation Research: Lessons Learned and Future Possibilities

   Secules, Stephen; Kali, Maimuna Begum; McCall, Cassandra (January 2022, American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference)

   Background: While a primary goal of education research is discovering and disseminating scholarly knowledge, traditional dissemination alone is insufficient to foster sustainable educational change. Journals and conferences target a particular audience invested in a specific topic; it is often not practical for stakeholders to engage with research outside of their specific areas of specialization. Thus, the research-to-practice gap continually widens as education research findings fail to influence wider audiences. Purpose: In this paper, we highlight audio as a promising alternative format for dissemination. Audio dissemination has the potential to multiply the impacts of qualitative research by disseminating findings with more immediacy and accessibility than traditional research publications. Approach: We summarize one specific audio narrative dissemination approach conducted as part of the pilot phase of the Audio for Inclusion Project, a recent National Science Foundation-funded project to foster inclusive understandings for engineering faculty. We organize the discussion around orienting goals and challenges encountered, as well as lessons learned and suggestions for future improvements. Findings: Lessons learned for audio narrative dissemination include paying close attention to creating a coherent and cohesive narrative by removing distracting details, and aligning student actors with participants so that the tone, affect, and emphasis remain true to the participant. Implications: This paper presents new possibilities for qualitative researchers on broadening participation, to repurpose their interview content to form practical resources and training that can improve faculty’s knowledge, empathy, and understanding of students’ diverse and marginalized backgrounds. Additionally, these findings will be useful for all researchers seeking new methods of translating research findings into actionable impact. 

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2. Exploring composite narratives as a methodology to understand and share research findings in engineering education

   Sajadi, Susan; Kellam, Nadia N.; Brunhaver, Samantha R. (June 2023, American Society for Engineering Education)

   In this methods paper, the development and utility of composite narratives will be explored. Composite narratives, which involve combining aspects of multiple interviews into a single narrative, are a relatively modern methodology used in the qualitative research literature for several purposes: to do justice to complex accounts while maintaining participant anonymity, summarize data in a more engaging personal form and retain the human face of the data, illustrate specific aspects of the research findings, enhance the transferability of research findings by invoking empathy, illuminate collective experiences, and enhance research impact by providing findings in a manner more accessible to those outside of academia. Composite narratives leverage the power of storytelling, which has shown to be effective in studies of neurology and psychology; i.e., since humans often think and process information in narrative structures, the information conveyed in story form can be imprinted more easily on readers’ minds or existing schema. Engineering education researchers have increasingly begun using narrative research methods. Recently, researchers have begun exploring composite narratives as an approach to enable more complex and nuanced understandings of engineering education while mitigating potential issues around the confidentiality of participants. Because this is a relatively new methodology in higher education more broadly and in engineering education specifically, more examples of how to construct and utilize composite narratives in both research and practice are needed. This paper will share how we created a composite narrative from interviews we collected for our work so that others can adapt this methodology for their research projects. The paper will also discuss ways we modified and enhanced these narratives to connect research to practice and impact engineering students. This approach involved developing probing questions to stimulate thinking, learning, and discussion in academic and industrial educational settings. We developed the composite narratives featured in this paper from fifteen semi-structured critical incident interviews with engineering managers about their perceptions of adaptability. The critical incidents shared were combined to develop seven composite narratives reflecting real-life situations to which engineers must adapt in the workplace. These scenarios, grounded in the data, were taken directly to the engineering classroom for discussion with students on how they would respond and adapt to the presented story. In this paper, we detail our process of creating one composite narrative from the broader study and its associated probing questions for research dissemination in educational settings. We present this detailed account of how one composite narrative was constructed to demonstrate the quality and trustworthiness of the composite narrative methodology and assist in its replication by other scholars. Further, we discuss the benefits and limitations of this methodology, highlighting the parts of the data brought into focus using this method and how that contrasts with an inductive-deductive approach to qualitative coding also taken in this research project. 

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3. Using narratives to evoke empathy in museum-based engineering activities

   Bennett, Dorothy; Letourneau, Susan M.; McMillan Culp, Katherine; Liu, James; Argudo, Yessenia (April 2019, American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting)

   In this design-based research project, researchers and activity developers across four institutions are investigating how narratives can evoke empathy and influence girls’ participation and engagement in museum-based engineering design activities. The project involves the development and testing of six pairs of engineering activities. Through iterative development of these activity pairs, we have refined a conceptual model defining how engineering activities can incorporate a variety of narrative elements to support empathy and engagement. In addition, each pair includes one version of the activity with narrative elements, and one without — for example, children design a vehicle that can move over different textured surfaces (non-narrative) or that can help someone travel around the world across different landscapes (narrative), allowing us to examine how narrative elements influence girls’ ideation and persistence in iterating their designs. We analyzed the number of children who participated in each version of the activities, average hold times, and detailed observations and follow-up interviews with girls between ages 7-14 who tried the activities with their families. Results showed that narrative versions invited greater participation among both girls and boys, and that different narrative elements (such as characters and settings) evoked different aspects of empathy (such as affective responses and cognitive perspective-taking). We discuss the implications of the results for the design and facilitation of inclusive engineering design experiences in informal learning settings. 

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4. Board 223: CAREER: Exploring the Intersection of LGBTQ Identities and STEM Disciplines: A Qualitative Narrative Approach

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--46792  

   Hughes, Bryce; Teye, Emmanuel; Lambert, Nickolas (June 2024, ASEE Conferences)

   The purpose of this poster paper is to present progress toward reaching the third research aim of an NSF CAREER-funded study, using qualitative methods to explore the intersection of LGBTQ and STEM identities. The overall project purpose is to explore LGBTQ students’ engagement in STEM disciplines. LGBTQ students often leave engineering and other STEM fields at a higher rate than their peers due to unwelcoming environments, and engineering educators should tackle issues like heteronormativity and cissexism in the learning environment to promote diversity among future practicing engineers. The past year of the project has been focused on finishing data collection for the first research aim, investigating the influence of LGBTQ students' social networks on non-cognitive STEM outcomes, and securing data access agreements for the second research aim, comparing STEM degree completion rates between LGBTQ students and cisgender, heterosexual peers. For this poster, we focus on the process of developing a qualitative, narrative study exploring how LGBTQ STEM students experience discipline-based identities. Our poster presents the development of our interview protocol, grounded in engineering identity and possible selves, as well as our methods for collecting and analyzing qualitative data elicited through interviews. We use possible selves as an identity-based motivation framework in developing the interview protocol that focuses on students' anticipated career paths helping to understand how students are motivated to act in ways that are congruent to who they wish to become and wish to avoid becoming with respect to their decision to enter STEM. Development of the instrument began with a review of the literature to find key concepts that need to be covered in the interviews as well as example interview questions to be adapted for this study. In particular, the research team reviewed instruments used in prior research on possible selves to understand how existing procedures could be adapted to fit the purposes of this project. Following IRB approval, the interview protocol was refined through pilot testing with people who meet the study’s criteria for inclusion. Our next step is to recruit students for participation in this phase of the research. Many of these students will be identified through the survey from the first research aim of the project which gathered contact information for participants interested in participating in follow-up research. Others will be identified through recruitment nationally with organizations such as oSTEM. We expect to have preliminary data to discuss at the ASEE 2024 poster session, but data collection is expected to last through much of the coming year. Once these data are collected and analyzed, the overall project will move into a phase focused on completing the project’s educational aims and broad dissemination of findings across all three research aims. 

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5. COVID-19 and documentary linguistics: Some ways forward

   Nicholas Williams, W. D. (January 2021, Language documentation and description)

   In the wake of widespread and ongoing travel restrictions that began in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many documentary linguists worldwide shifted to remote work methods in order to continue or, in some cases, begin new projects. This pandemic situation has prompted questions about both methodological and ethical considerations in doing remote fieldwork. In this paper, we discuss the pros and cons of working remotely and discuss ways of working remotely based on our experiences working on projects in West Africa, northwest Amazonia, and Indonesia. We argue that elements of remote fieldwork should become a permanent part of linguistic fieldwork, but that such methods need to be considered in the context of decolonizing language documentation and centering the community’s needs and interests. 

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