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Lessons Learned from Others’ Stories: How Changemakers’ Stories Changed Us

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Conference

2013 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Atlanta, Georgia

Publication Date

June 23, 2013

Start Date

June 23, 2013

End Date

June 26, 2013

ISSN

2153-5965

Conference Session

Tricks of the Trade

Tagged Division

Student

Page Count

14

Page Numbers

23.863.1 - 23.863.14

DOI

10.18260/1-2--19877

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/19877

Download Count

277

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Paper Authors

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Joi-lynn Mondisa Purdue University, West Lafayette Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-3959-6548

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Joi-Lynn Mondisa is a doctoral student in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University, West Lafayette. Her research interests focus on examining how mentoring intervention programs promote the success of undergraduates in STEM majors and how mentoring can increase the retention rates of underrepresented populations in STEM programs.

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Junaid A. Siddiqui Purdue University, West Lafayette Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-7243-6661

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Junaid A. Siddiqui is a doctoral candidate at the School of Engineering Education, Purdue University. In his graduate work he is exploring the systems of conceptual and social challenges associated with educational change for the development of undergraduate engineering education. Before joining the doctoral program he worked for nine years in a faculty development role at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), Saudi Arabia. He received his M.S. in Civil Engineering from KFUPM and also has earned an MPBL degree from Aalborg University, Denmark.

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Mel Chua Purdue University

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Linda Vanasupa California Polytechnic State University

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Linda Vanasupa has been a professor of materials engineering at the California Polytechnic State University since 1991. She also serves as co-director of the Center for Sustainability in Engineering at Cal Poly. Her life's work is focused on creating alternatives ways of learning, living and being to the industrial era solutions--alternatives that nourish ourselves, one another and the places in which we live.

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Roberta J Herter California Polytechnic State University

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Robin Adams Purdue University, West Lafayette

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Robin S. Adams is an Associate Professor in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. Her research is concentrated in three interconnecting areas: cross-disciplinary thinking, acting, and being; design cognition and learning; and theories of change in linking engineering education research and practice.

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Abstract

Lessons Learned from Others’ Stories: How Changemakers’ Stories Changed UsWhat happens when your research changes you? In the Fall of 2011, we came together toanalyze eight transcripts from interviews with Changemakers, prominent change agents whohave exemplar records in enabling socially beneficial change in STEM education. Each of ushad our own reasons for participating in the project; for some it was an opportunity to learn howto conduct qualitative research, for others the topic itself was compelling. Through iterativelyreading and discussing these transcripts, we have been learning about these Changemakers’backgrounds, motivations and inspirations, how they see themselves as change agents, and howthey approach change. Emerging from this process is a view of how these themes connect aspart of a bigger picture illustrating the relationships between personal stories – such astransformative moments that shaped a change intention – and personal theories about howchange happens.Through this collaborative experience of making sense of the experiences of theseChangemakers, we ourselves have changed. Discussions about the ways Changemakers talkabout change and how their personal stories are embodied in these views have brought our ownviews about change to the forefront and have opened us up to new ways of thinking about howchange occurs. The lessons these Changemakers have learned and their sometimes unexpectedlanguage for talking about change have affected our personal relationships to our own researchby pushing us to make sense of our own research interests.In this paper we share the rarely told stories about how research can assist researchers in thinkingthrough who we are and what we care about, and why what we do offers insight into how we canbetter understand our research and explore ideas from multiple frameworks to enrich discovery.We also draw upon a learning partnership framework to build connections between ourexperiences and models of transformative learning.

Mondisa, J., & Siddiqui, J. A., & Chua, M., & Vanasupa, L., & Herter, R. J., & Adams, R. (2013, June), Lessons Learned from Others’ Stories: How Changemakers’ Stories Changed Us Paper presented at 2013 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Atlanta, Georgia. 10.18260/1-2--19877

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: © 2013 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