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Background The study of emotions in engineering education (EEE) has increased in recent years, but this emerging, multidisciplinary body of research is dispersed and not well consolidated. This paper reports on the first systematic review of EEE research and scholarship. Purpose The review aimed to critically assess how researchers and scholars in engineering education have conceptualized emotions and how those conceptualizations have been used to frame and conduct EEE research and scholarship. Scope/Method The systematic review followed the procedures of a configurative meta‐synthesis, mapping emotion theories and concepts, research purposes and methods, and citation patterns in the EEE literature. The review proceeded through five stages: (i) scoping and database searching; (ii) abstract screening, full text sifting, and full text review; (iii) pearling; (iv) scoping review, and (v) in‐depth analysis for the meta‐synthesis review. Two hundred and thirteen publications were included in the final analysis. Results The results show that the EEE literature has not extensively engaged with the wide range of conceptualizations of emotion available in the educational, psychological, and sociological literature. Further, the focus on emotion often seems to have been unintentional and of secondary importance in studies whose primary goals were to study other phenomena. Conclusions More research adopting intentional, theorized approaches to emotions will be crucial in further developing the field. To do justice to complex emotional phenomena in teaching and learning, future EEE research will also need to engage a broader range of conceptualizations of emotion and research methods, drawing on diverse disciplinary traditions. 

Engineering education research heavily relies on qualitative studies that utilize interview-based approaches. The quality and depth of knowledge derived from these studies depend heavily on the craft of conducting interviews, a facet often overlooked in prior work on qualitative methods. This special session aims to address this gap by guiding engineering education researchers in honing their interviewing skills for qualitative research. Participants will learn best practices for developing interview protocols, creating an accessible environment, and capturing high-quality data. Through case studies and hands-on activities, attendees will gain confidence in moderating conversations, improving data collection, and enhancing their overall skillset. This session provides an opportunity for researchers interested in qualitative research and scholarly educators to deepen their understanding of conducting meaningful interviews. By bridging the gap between the importance of qualitative studies and the need for skilled interviewers, we aim to contribute to the advancement of engineering education research. 

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. 

In this special session, we invited participants to identify how they might be interacting with cultures of anti-Blackness of engineering education environments through the potent experience of racial shame. The facilitators, informed by their respective backgrounds in anti-racism and professional shame, guided the participants through an interactive series of activities that inspire reflective thinking and, more importantly, a commitment to act to bolster justice and equity in engineering education cultures. 

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.