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In this paper, we present an overview of an NSF CAREER project, in which we seek to advance academic well-being by understanding how engineering faculty experience and reproduce experiences of professional shame. We present an overview of our data collection of non-standardized interviews with engineering faculty (n = 21) and how we are using interpretative phenomenological analysis to examine select individual cases (n = 12). We report our preliminary insights that 1) participants experienced complex and manifold socially constructed expectations that form the basis of their professional shame experiences and 2) participants’ experiences of professional shame varied according to how central their roles as faculty were to their identities. We describe our immediate next steps to integrate the processes of two qualitative studies so that we can generate insight into how engineering faculty link their experiences to their departmental cultures and ultimately train departments to build cultures where faculty and students are able to live well with the experience of professional shame. 

Prior research on faculty-student interactions in engineering education generally conceptualizes the function of these episodes to be supportive of professional development. In this paper, we examine the experience of professional shame amid faculty-student interactions. More generally, we examine the emotional significance of interactions between faculty and students and how such moments can affect how students cope with the experience of professional shame. Our findings are based on a thematic analysis that followed a broader qualitative mixed-method investigation of how engineering students experience professional shame. Specifically, we analyzed specific episodes of moments where the experience of shame was connected to faculty members within focus group transcripts (n = 10) of engineering students (n = 38) and interview transcripts with engineering students (n = 16). We generated three themes that characterized the experience of professional shame amid faculty-student interactions. First, faculty would engender shame through conveying vague, holistic expectations of what it means to be an engineer. Second, students would cope with the experience of shame by blaming the faculty member for the experience. Finally, some students saw the faculty member as a source of hope while they experienced professional shame. These findings point to the crucial role that faculty play in not only preparing engineering students for professional practice but also for cultivating environments of well-being within engineering programs.