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The benefits of interdisciplinary research teams are well-known; however, there can be challenges due to differences in how disciplines approach knowledge construction. To better understand how interdisciplinary research teams navigate these differences in thinking, we used tools from ethnography to discover the cultural knowledge created and used by an engineering education research team and individuals on the team. We then used approaches from constructivist grounded theory to interpret these insights and transform them into a preliminary model of how interdisciplinary engineering education researchers navigate differences in thinking. This methodology paper outlines our process and the benefits of combining approaches from ethnography and constructivist grounded theory to simultaneously explore group culture and individual perceptions. We describe how and why we combined approaches from these two methodologies to develop our preliminary model. The aim of this paper is to provide an example of how qualitative researchers can be creative with their methodological approaches to comprehensively explore their social reality under investigation. 

Engineering education research groups strive to transform the field of engineering through the integration of research and practice. Many of these research groups are interdisciplinary, including individuals from different fields (e.g., engineering, engineering education, education, sociology) and different roles within an institution. These individuals bring their own approaches to the generation, expression, and application of knowledge. While these epistemic differences can support the use of novel, interdisciplinary approaches, they can also lead to tensions that prevent groups from meeting their core goals. The goal of this project is to explore how engineering education research groups navigate these epistemic differences and engage in critical conversations to make research decisions. In Phase A of our study, we used Longino’s Critical Contextual Empiricism framework, which defines four norms of an idealized knowledge generating community to characterize the epistemic culture of the groups we studied. In this paper, we focus on how the norm of providing venues for critique and idea sharing supports critical conversations and inclusion among group members. We identified three affordances related to a group’s use of shared agendas, a type of venue that facilitate discussion of multiple project efforts, facilitate participation, and support group memory. Our work shows the importance of considering the details of the venue used to hold group meetings and how aspects of these spaces can support critical interactions among group members.