Asee peer logo

Convergence Research in Graduate Engineering Education

Download Paper |

Conference

2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Publication Date

June 22, 2025

Start Date

June 22, 2025

End Date

August 15, 2025

Conference Session

GSD 7: Innovative Graduate Education

Tagged Division

Graduate Studies Division (GSD)

Page Count

20

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/56151

Paper Authors

biography

Yunus Doğan Telliel Worcester Polytechnic Institute

visit author page

Yunus Doğan Telliel is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He is in the Humanities and Arts department and has collaborative faculty appointments in the Interactive Media and Game Development program and the Robotics Engineering department.

visit author page

author page

Matthew James Lydon Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Download Paper |

Abstract

With the U.S. National Science Foundation’s emphasis on convergence research as one of their ten big ideas for future investment, more researchers explicitly acknowledge the value of convergence research. Yet, many also report that they have difficulty in creating educational programs that help new generations of researchers learn convergence research. Focusing on data from ethnographic interviews with an interdisciplinary cohort of engineering graduate students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, this paper argues that one major barrier to initiating sustainable convergence training programs in STEM education is the challenge of incorporating the experiences of the ‘convergence researchers’ into a transdisciplinary framework. Within the dominant culture of academic research, at least in engineering fields in the U.S., convergence research is often seen as the process of conjoining two or more established academic disciplines. By highlighting the embodied, relational, and often improvisational aspects of convergence research, the interviewed graduate students drew our attention to the need to address experiential processes embedded in transdisciplinary processes in addition to academic outputs that come out of these processes. Our study proposes a framework that considers 'feedback flows' to be the driving force behind convergence research without restricting the form or source of that feedback. This framework can be organically built by centering the experiential knowledge of the convergence researcher.

Telliel, Y. D., & Lydon, M. J. (2025, June), Convergence Research in Graduate Engineering Education Paper presented at 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Montreal, Quebec, Canada . https://peer.asee.org/56151

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2025 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015