Early Career Faculty Transitions: Negotiating Legitimacy and Seeking Support in Engineering Education

Abstract

Background: There is limited research exploring the experiences of engineering education scholars transitioning into faculty positions. It is an opportune time to explore these transitions because there is a growing number of scholars identifying with the community, a growing number of doctoral programs being developed, and growing interest in hiring people with engineering education expertise. Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this study is to examine the transitions experienced by our research team of early career engineering education faculty. We describe and systematically analyze our personal experiences to capture the significant events and isolating factors that impacted our transitions. Design/Method: We engaged in a multiphase, multi-method, longitudinal research design grounded in collaborative autoethnography and collaborative inquiry. We leveraged Transition Theory and a multiple case study approach to examine written reflections recorded monthly for two years and ultimately identify the incidents that were critical to defining our experiences within our new roles. Results: While we each held positions in different institutional contexts, we found ourselves negotiating our legitimacy as faculty members, researchers, educators, and administrators. Three themes emerged: 1) understanding the expectations of our roles, 2) establishing our visibility, and 3) fulfilling our own purpose within our institutions. In response to these experiences, we sought support from others within our institutional context and among the engineering education community. Yet, the success of this support-seeking strategy varied across our group. Conclusions: The results of this work signify a need to support early career engineering education scholars in the development of local support networks as well as in their attempts to negotiate their legitimacy in faculty positions. Continued education of administrators and faculty members on the differences between engineering education research and scholarship will be helpful in ensuring that early career engineering education faculty have the support and resources necessary to succeed as researchers and educational change agents.

Defining Academic Engineering Education Roles within the United States

“…Our preliminary work has demonstrated that early-career EES undertake a variety of roles and responsibilities depending on their institutional context. As was identified in McCave et al (2020), there are many types of jobs that EES can pursue, but how EES structure their work within these positions can vary depending on the resources and support they are provided (Coso Strong et al, 2021) and the institutional context.…”

“…However, many students lack clarity on the types of roles and responsibilities that exist within engineering education academic positions and how to select the position that would be the best fit for them personally. Similarly, though academic institutions are aware of the value that an engineering education researcher can bring to a department or program (Benson et al, 2010), they lack clarity on how to support Engineering Education Scholars (EES), individuals who have expertise in both engineering education research and practice, and what resources EES need to have their desired impact (Coso Strong et al, 2021).…”

In pursuit of impact: Toward a contextualized theory of professional agency of engineering education scholars

“…While our prior work describes our use of collaborative inquiry and collaborative autoethnography (Coso Strong et al, 2021;Faber et al, 2016Faber et al, , 2020, the research design detailed herein emphasizes our use of constructivist grounded theory. We used approaches from constructivist grounded theory because it includes methods to analyze actions and processes, develop conceptual categories from data, and explore the bounds of our theoretical understanding to ultimately construct a contextualized theory (Charmaz, 2014).…”

“…Because our work is situated within our roles and experiences, we provide an overview of our pathways and our desired impact areas at the time we began this project in Table 1. Our prior work focuses on the actions and strategies we used as we transitioned into these positions (Coso Strong et al, 2021). These details provide the context to interpret our results.…”

“…In short, we chose to prioritize making sense of our own experiences and critically interrogating our own agency. This prioritization resulted in a pragmatic approach to data collection and analysis that leveraged a variety of data collection and analysis techniques we used in prior work (see Coso Strong et al, 2021; Smith‐Orr et al, 2019). We found ourselves asking questions about what we knew and what we did not know and making methodological decisions based on our current understanding of the social reality under investigation and our individual research methods expertise.…”