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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. 

Many of us are working to create a more inclusive and socially just culture within engineering education and engineering. Despite significant effort, marginalization and discrimination continue, buoyed by systems of oppression. How can we disrupt and dismantle oppressive systems in engineering education? In our work, we explore how power and privilege are enacted within leadership teams that aim to create revolutionary changes within engineering departments. Based on this work, we developed the POWER protocol (Privilege and Oppression: Working for Equitable Recourse), a workshop that guides engineering educators to identify and understand the intersectional nature of power and privilege before planning strategies to disrupt, disarm, and dismantle it. In this paper, we present a design case to show how this workshop has evolved. We provide the POWER protocol in the appendix so that others can adapt this workshop for their own contexts. In the interactive session at CoNECD, we will take attendees through part of the POWER protocol (we will scope the workshop to fit in the time allotted; the full workshop is 1.5 hours) to examine how power, privilege, and intersectionality can help attendees frame their experiences and begin to understand how their everyday experiences may be influenced by systemic oppression. To guide this process, we orient around the question: How can we become aware of power and privilege on collaborative academic teams in order to better affect social change and improve interdisciplinary and cross-identity/boundary interactions, communication, and inclusivity? We hope that through interactive sessions such as this that we can all become more persistent and sophisticated in our efforts to dismantle some of these forms of power and privilege within the university, especially those aspects that continue to oppress and oftentimes push marginalized people and perspectives out of academia. Our interactive approach will position attendees to bring this protocol back to their institutions and adapt it to their own contexts. In the tradition of the design case such as those published by the International Journal of Designs for Learning, we detail how our contexts and the literature informed the iterative development of the POWER protocol in this paper. We provide a vivid account of the POWER protocol and a facilitation guide that others can use and adapt in their own contexts. Using a narrative format, we share a forthright account of our development process. Design cases are valuable in highlighting distinctive aspects of how a design came to be; by sharing our design decisions along with the design, others may gain insight into both what has made our design successful, and where it may be brittle when used in new contexts. Finally, we describe how we will engage attendees in the CoNECD session.