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The built environment requires extraction and consumption of enormous quantities of raw materials, water, and energy. While these materials remain in use for several years or decades, growing global populations and aging infrastructure are driving widespread generation of one of the largest and most challenging waste streams to manage. There is growing interest from communities in integrating circular economy (CE) strategies in the context of construction & demolition (C&D) material management. Many approaches for doing so focus on small-scale CE applications like individual products, materials, or projects. However, greater understanding is needed at the city-scale given communities’ complex position at the frontlines of local development, resource consumption, and waste management. This study summarizes the development of an evaluative framework for community-based C&D circularity at a city or regional level. The framework expands upon a mixed methods approach called the Circularity Assessment Protocol (CAP), which integrates aspects of urban metabolism, geospatial analysis, and qualitative research methods to examine plastic waste management in communities. To advance convergent CE research, here, we aim to adapt the CAP framework to C&D. We describe our adaptation of the CAP to C&D through a conceptual review describing research, methods, and strategies related to seven elements of a local CE context: C&D Analytics, Building Material and Design, Community, Use, Collection, End-of-Cycle, and C&D Emissions. This work describes a novel yet preliminary conceptualization for developing a baseline understanding of circular C&D material management and a holistic examination of barriers, affordances, and opportunities for improving city-wide circularity. 

Engineering education research often uses interview-based studies to develop critical theoretical findings for transforming engineering education and practice. However, researchers are often left with few practical tools to hone the craft of interviewing, especially for unscripted interactions or moments that go beyond predefined protocols. Here, we introduce a process-oriented tool designed to refine researchers' interviewing capabilities. By focusing on adaptability and reflexivity, this tool aims to elevate the quality of evaluative discussions between novice researchers and their mentors. 

In this paper, we provide an overview of an NSF CAREER project where we seek to advance academic well-being by understanding how engineering faculty experience and reproduce experiences of professional shame. After conducting non-standardized interviews with engineering faculty (n = 23), we use interpretative phenomenological analysis to examine select individual cases (n = 10) that illustrate poignant individual experiences of professional shame. In this paper, we summarize three cases to demonstrate the complexity and function of professional shame in the interior world of faculty members. 

Prior methodological literature on conducting interviews emphasizes the importance of skill development in conducting interviews. However, in contrast to qualitative data analysis, there are few systematic processes in place to guide the interviewer into reflexivity about their role in the interview situation. Here, we present the interview quality reflection tool (IQRT) as a process that we developed from conducting and mentoring semi-structured and unstructured interviews focused on personal lived experiences. The IQRT prompts the interviewer to transcribe each interview question and reflect on how the spoken question served to advance experiential quality in the interview. We illustrate the IQRT itself before demonstrating how we authors used the process to examine experiential quality in three cases conducted in our prior research. Finally, we consider how the IQRT enables researchers to examine the interview situation as a whole, by increasing the self-awareness of the interviewer, and the parts, by commenting on the mechanics of constructing useful questions. 

Contribution: This study aimed to improve understanding of context-based affordances and barriers to adoption of evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs) among faculty in electrical and computer engineering (ECE). Context-based influences, including motives, constraints, and feedback mechanisms impacting EBIP adoption across six ECE faculty participants were documented using qualitative analysis. Background: Recent engineering education literature notes that the adoption of EBIPs by engineering faculty is lagging despite increased faculty awareness of EBIPs, belief in their effectiveness, and interest in integrating them. While researchers continue to investigate barriers to faculty adoption of EBIPs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education settings, few studies have dedicated examinations within a specific disciplinary context, particularly among ECE faculty members. Research Question: What context-based barriers and affordances influence adoption of EBIPs by ECE faculty members? Methodology: This study qualitatively analyzed data from in-depth interviews with six ECE faculty members from engineering programs throughout the United States. The study applied an iterative combination of case study and thematic analysis techniques to identify context-relevant and unique factors relevant to each individual participant and synthesize the process of decision making when incorporating EBIPs using a systems perspective. Findings: Overall, the approach identified drivers, constraints, and feedback mechanisms in regard to four emergent categories of EBIP adoption cases: 1) no use; 2) discontinued use; 3) in development; and 4) continued use. The study reports examples of context-based influences among the six participants in relation to their level of EBIP adoption, highlighting the substantial variation in faculty experiences with incorporating EBIPs 

This methods paper presents the interview quality reflection tool (IQRT) to evaluate the quality of qualitative research interviews. Qualitative researchers commonly use semi-structured interviews that rely on the interviewers’ ability to improvise in real time based on the needs of the study. Given that interviewing involves numerous tacit skills that cannot be delineated by a simple written protocol, it is necessary that researchers develop interview competencies through practice and reflection. While prior literature on interviewing has often focused on developing interview protocols, we know little about how interviewers themselves may be trained to gather high-quality data. In this paper, we focus on how the IQRT may be used to guide the self-assessment of research interviews. We discuss how interviews are used in engineering education, how we developed and applied the IQRT, and how lessons learned through using this tool might lead to improved interviewing skills through careful examination of interview structure, content, and context within the mentoring process. 

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. 

In this workshop, we introduced participants to the tacit and often hidden skills of doing interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to understand lived experience in engineering education. With the growth of IPA research in engineering education, this workshop was designed to sharpen the skills of participants who come with experience in qualitative research and provide practical guidance to participants who may be novices to qualitative research. The workshop was characterized by an interactive style, in which participants collectively analyze a transcript excerpt from an interview with an engineering student regarding their experience of shame. To strengthen the translation of the workshop, the session was intentionally facilitated by both an expert in conducting IPA research and a highly trained engineer who is at the beginning stages of doing IPA. 

This Work-In-Progress paper summarizes insights from early research activities related to a National Science Foundation (NSF) Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) project investigating faculty adoption of evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs) in engineering classrooms. We are investigating EBIPs in engineering classrooms because, although instructors are interested and willing to adopt them, uptake by engineering faculty is lagging. To understand what is driving limited incorporation of EBIPs, our research objectives are anchored in our overlying goal of examining the lived experience of engineering faculty as they seek out and try innovative teaching practices (i.e., EBIPs) in their courses. This paper reports insights from early exploratory interviews with engineering faculty around their experiences with trying EBIPs. We report on general patterns observed during the early stages of our analysis of the interview transcripts with three engineering faculty (n = 3). We discuss how our analysis informs the next steps of our overarching investigation and briefly discuss the broader significance related to the context of faculty approaches for implementing EBIPs into their engineering courses. 

This paper summarizes the current status of our NSF CAREER investigation of engineering faculty members’ experiences of professional shame. In the first year of this project, we used interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to examine the emotional experience among individual faculty members in engineering programs. Our objectives are anchored in our overarching goal to understand the connections between the emotion regulation of engineering faculty and the academic cultures that embed them. This paper focuses on the work that has been completed in the first year of this project examining the individual experiences of engineering faculty with professional shame. We report on general patterns from the early stages of our analysis of interview transcripts with four engineering faculty members (n = 14). We discuss how our IPA work informs the next steps of our overarching investigation, and briefly discuss the broader significance related to the context of faculty wellbeing within engineering education.