Keywords: research, community, serendipity, change pathways
Becoming an Engineering Education Researcher: Finding Pathways Toward Interdisciplinarity
Interdisciplinary thinking is gaining momentum as an important topic for empirical investigation, particularly
in regard to how crossing disciplinary boundaries can enrich teaching and learning across fields. There is a need
for researchers who can think and work at the interdisciplinary interface. However, despite increased attention
given to interdisciplinarity as a goal, there remains much to understand about the nature of interdisciplinary work
and who is doing it. This study focuses on one particular interdisciplinary setting: engineering education—an
interdisciplinary space at the interface between engineering and education perspectives.
Implications for Engineering Education Research
| By better understanding interdisciplinary work, we can make visible interdisciplinary
ways of thinking and the process of constructing interdisciplinary identities.
|
By better understanding interdisciplinary work, we can make visible interdisciplinary ways of thinking and the
process of constructing interdisciplinary identities. This knowledge can then be used to design environments
for bringing people into interdisciplinary scholarship and scaling up programs that build capacity and sustain
communities. This research will be used to support those who work in interdisciplinary spaces and explore how
programs that work to build capacity in engineering education research can be effective “change pathways” for
improving engineering teaching and learning.
What We Found
Findings emerged regarding three major elements of the process of becoming an interdisciplinary researcher: 1)
the points of entry to this type of work and to the interdisciplinary space where this work takes place; 2)
what facilitates people’s continued work in and navigation through this space; and 3) strategies for successful
interdisciplinarity.
In the participants’ discussions of each of these elements, the theme of community emerged repeatedly, suggesting
that this is a significant theme across the pathway to interdisciplinarity. One observation that emerged from our
findings is that interdisciplinary work cannot easily be done in isolation. Community is important in any field
or type of work, but it appears to be particularly critical when entering and working in an interdisciplinary field.
We noted that as the nature of the scholars’ communities evolved, so did their relationships to those communities,
as evidenced in their statements about their professional identities. Each scholar had a slightly different way of
describing his or her identity and position in the interdisciplinary space between engineering and education. However,
these responses had in common an intentional inclusion of both the engineering and education sides of their
professional lives.
Another common theme across the participants’ stories was what we call "intentional serendipity," referring to the
scholars’ tendencies to talk about steps in their pathways in terms of luck or chance, while at the same time
providing evidence of intentionality in making those steps happen. Opportunities to get involved in education
research projects seemed to "just come up" or were "assigned," or scholars were "luckily" offered education-related
positions. Despite this language of "luck," the intentionality of their actions is apparent in the scholars’
efforts to meet people who can provide entry, build community networks, and construct an identity as an
interdisciplinary engineering education researcher with others in the community.
Excerpts of three participants’ stories are discussed in more detail in the full text paper using the two themes
above as a lens for examining and interpreting pathways to interdisciplinarity and will help
further our understanding of how to support scholars on such pathways.
Methods and Data Sources
For this exploratory study, participants included ten individuals at various levels of membership in the engineering
education research community that were 1) known to work across multiple disciplines, 2) committed to this kind of
interdisciplinary work, and 3) recognized as members of the community. Semi-structured interviews were used to
engage participants in conversations about their interdisciplinary work. Participants were asked about how they
became interested in engineering education, how they began doing this kind of work, what challenges they faced and
how they overcame those challenges, and what advice they would give to others who wish to enter the field.
Authors: Cheryl Allendoerfer, Robin Adams, Philip Bell, Lorraine Fleming, and Larry Leifer
Source: Paper presented at the 2007 American Educational Research Association Conference
For a printable pdf of this research brief, click here.
Brief created July 2007
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