Collaborative research: Supporting agency among early career engineering education faculty in diverse institutional contexts

Given the infancy of engineering education as an established field and the recent increase in early career faculty aligning themselves with the discipline, it is imperative that the community better understand the experiences of these new faculty members. As a result, we will be able to enhance national efforts to train and develop faculty prepared to drive change in engineering education. Accordingly, this two-phased study investigates how institutional context influences the agency of our research team and other early career engineering education faculty as it relates to facilitating change in engineering education. Faculty play a central role in making change, thus there is a need to further understand the factors that influence their ability to do so. This work leverages collaborative inquiry and collaborative autoethnography to explore the lived experiences of our research team, which consists of six engineering education faculty who have different roles and responsibilities and are positioned in varied settings at diverse institutions. We represent a variety of perspectives with regard to our goals, visions, and training in engineering education. This project officially started in May 2017; however, we began collecting data in August 2015. Our poster will present a summary of our current progress, which includes the use of the Q3 Research Quality workshop to guide data collection and analysis. In addition to the methodological impact of our study, the results will provide the engineering education community with evidence-based insights on conditions that facilitate change efforts by early career engineering education faculty. By sharing our findings with current and developing engineering education graduate programs, we will enable them to make programmatic changes to benefit future faculty. These findings also will provide a mechanism for divisions of the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) to develop programming and resources to support the sustained success of their members.