Work-in-Progress: Describing the Epistemic Culture of our Research Teams from Ethnographic Observations

Courtney June Faber; Lorna Treffert; Isabel Anne Boyd

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Conference: 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Portland, Oregon
Publication Date: June 23, 2024
Start Date: June 23, 2024
End Date: July 12, 2024
Conference Session: Educational Research and Methods Division (ERM) Technical Session 20
Tagged Division: Educational Research and Methods Division (ERM)
Tagged Topic: Diversity
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/48533

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Paper Authors

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Courtney June Faber University at Buffalo, The State University of New York orcid.org/0000-0001-9156-7616

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Courtney Faber, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Engineering Education at the University at Buffalo (UB). Prior to joining UB in August of 2023, she was a Research Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in Engineering Fundamentals at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She was also the Director of the Fundamentals of Engineering and Computing Teaching in Higher Education Certificate Program. Her research focuses on empowering engineering education scholars to be more effective at impacting transformational change in engineering and developing educational experiences that consider epistemic thinking. She develops and uses innovative research methods that allow for deep investigations of constructs such as epistemic thinking, identity, and agency. Dr. Faber has a B.S. in Bioengineering and a Ph.D. in Engineering and Science Education from Clemson University and a M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Cornell University. Among other awards for her research, she was awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2022 to study epistemic negotiations on interdisciplinary engineering education research teams.

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Lorna Treffert University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

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Lorna Treffert is a 2nd year Ph.D. student in the Engineering Education Department at the University at Buffalo. She holds both a BS and MS in Industrial and Systems Engineering. Her research interests include facilitating diversity and inclusion within engineering education, helping create authentic research experiences for undergraduate researchers, and applications of operations research in an education context.

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Isabel Anne Boyd University of Tennessee, Knoxville orcid.org/0000-0002-6244-9335

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Isabel recently graduated from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville earning her Bachelor's of Science in Biomedical Engineering with Honors. She has assisted with several qualitative and mixed-methods research projects centered around diversity and inclusion in engineering. She will begin a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering with a focus on Engineering Education at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Fall 2024.

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Abstract

In the field of engineering education, our research teams are foundational to promoting change in engineering. These teams seek to address complex problems that require interdisciplinary solutions. Many of these teams work across disciplinary boundaries and include individuals from different disciplinary backgrounds (e.g., engineering, engineering education, psychology). Each of these disciplines have their own norms around the generation, expression, and application of knowledge. It is important that these teams are able to navigate differences in thinking. Failure to acknowledge, address, and integrate these differences can lead to tensions that negatively impact their ability to have their desired impact. A team’s norms and approaches around the generation, expression, and application of knowledge define their epistemic culture. A team’s epistemic culture affects all aspects of the research process such as the types of questions they answer, knowledge they generate, knowers they recognize, and knowledge they share.

Existing work across Team Science and philosophy of science has primarily focused on the broader processes of research integration, the structure of knowledge generation, and the influence of the nature of science on current approaches within interdisciplinary research collaborations. Due to the complexities surrounding differences in thinking, findings cannot be translated from one interdisciplinary context to another without careful consideration of contextual features and interactions. While engineering education is similar to disciplines that have been studied (e.g., science and engineering), it is unique in that the researchers are often embedded in the field they are trying to impact (engineering) and integrate research approaches across fields that are cognitively divergent (e.g., engineering and sociology). Accordingly, the purpose of this work is to investigate the epistemic culture of engineering education research teams.

To meet this goal, we are conducting an ethnographic case study of a single engineering education research team (Team Y). Team Y is working on a multi-year, nationally funded project. The team members are located at multiple institutions across the United States and hold their weekly meetings virtually. We observed recordings of these virtual meetings that occurred across six months during 2023. At the time of our observations, the team had seven members that included engineering administrators, faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students from three different disciplines.

We are taking a topic-oriented approach to our ethnographic study, focusing on how Team Y navigates making research decisions. Our research process mirrors the steps defined by Spradley (1980) in his Developmental Research Sequence. Our work-in-progress paper will present a synthesized ethnographic description of Team Y’s research decision process that addresses two ethnographic questions: What values, goals, and feelings were expressed? and How do the actors engage with each other? The description is constructed from observations of two meetings in which the team is focusing on two different research decisions. We are synthesizing the description by identifying the core features of the two discussions and constructing our own research decision scenario that has core similarities to Team Y’s actual discussion. This approach will allow us to protect the identity of the team while still sharing the important features of the team’s navigation of their decisions. We will also present our analysis of the description using Longino’s Critical Contextual Empiricism framework that defines the norms for an idealized knowledge generating community. Through this analysis, we will describe Team Y’s epistemic culture based on their venues, uptake of critiques, standards, and intellectual equality.

Citation
Format

Faber, C. J., & Treffert, L., & Boyd, I. A. (2024, June), Work-in-Progress: Describing the Epistemic Culture of our Research Teams from Ethnographic Observations Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://peer.asee.org/48533

TY - CPAPER
AB - In the field of engineering education, our research teams are foundational to promoting change in engineering. These teams seek to address complex problems that require interdisciplinary solutions. Many of these teams work across disciplinary boundaries and include individuals from different disciplinary backgrounds (e.g., engineering, engineering education, psychology). Each of these disciplines have their own norms around the generation, expression, and application of knowledge. It is important that these teams are able to navigate differences in thinking. Failure to acknowledge, address, and integrate these differences can lead to tensions that negatively impact their ability to have their desired impact. A team’s norms and approaches around the generation, expression, and application of knowledge define their epistemic culture. A team’s epistemic culture affects all aspects of the research process such as the types of questions they answer, knowledge they generate, knowers they recognize, and knowledge they share.

Existing work across Team Science and philosophy of science has primarily focused on the broader processes of research integration, the structure of knowledge generation, and the influence of the nature of science on current approaches within interdisciplinary research collaborations. Due to the complexities surrounding differences in thinking, findings cannot be translated from one interdisciplinary context to another without careful consideration of contextual features and interactions. While engineering education is similar to disciplines that have been studied (e.g., science and engineering), it is unique in that the researchers are often embedded in the field they are trying to impact (engineering) and integrate research approaches across fields that are cognitively divergent (e.g., engineering and sociology). Accordingly, the purpose of this work is to investigate the epistemic culture of engineering education research teams.

To meet this goal, we are conducting an ethnographic case study of a single engineering education research team (Team Y). Team Y is working on a multi-year, nationally funded project. The team members are located at multiple institutions across the United States and hold their weekly meetings virtually. We observed recordings of these virtual meetings that occurred across six months during 2023. At the time of our observations, the team had seven members that included engineering administrators, faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students from three different disciplines.

We are taking a topic-oriented approach to our ethnographic study, focusing on how Team Y navigates making research decisions. Our research process mirrors the steps defined by Spradley (1980) in his Developmental Research Sequence. Our work-in-progress paper will present a synthesized ethnographic description of Team Y’s research decision process that addresses two ethnographic questions: What values, goals, and feelings were expressed? and How do the actors engage with each other? The description is constructed from observations of two meetings in which the team is focusing on two different research decisions. We are synthesizing the description by identifying the core features of the two discussions and constructing our own research decision scenario that has core similarities to Team Y’s actual discussion. This approach will allow us to protect the identity of the team while still sharing the important features of the team’s navigation of their decisions. We will also present our analysis of the description using Longino’s Critical Contextual Empiricism framework that defines the norms for an idealized knowledge generating community. Through this analysis, we will describe Team Y’s epistemic culture based on their venues, uptake of critiques, standards, and intellectual equality.
AU - Courtney June Faber
AU - Lorna Treffert
AU - Isabel Anne Boyd
CY - Portland, Oregon
DA - 2024/06/23
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Work-in-Progress: Describing the Epistemic Culture of our Research Teams from Ethnographic Observations
UR - https://peer.asee.org/48533
ER -