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The purpose of this paper is to uncover the role of emotion within an interdisciplinary, projectbased design studio as implemented in 2009 and 2010. This qualitative research study involves a narrative analysis of data collected over two semesters of the design studios to identify the types of emotions described, the change in these emotions over the semester, and the interaction of these emotions with learning. This analysis is conducted on students' written reflections, as it is important to understand emotions from the perspective of the student and within the desired context. More specifically, the research study consisted of a narrative analysis of individual reflection reports written by students after participating in multiple reflective activities over the course of one semester. Two student narratives are highlighted in this analysis. The analysis of this data indicates that emotions at the high end of the activation spectrum, for example angry, tense, and excited, were described by the students as leading to critical learning incidents. The students described how their emotions changed over time as participating in the overall class or an individual project. The presence of high-activation emotions within the student narratives indicates that higher order thinking strategies were present. Additionally, the presence of negative emotions at the beginning of projects and positive emotions later in the project suggests a need for more scaffolding of projects and activities at the beginning of the time period and less later in the project or activity.

The engineering education community is adopting an increasingly diverse range of qualitative methods. This rapid expansion in required methodological expertise has sparked a vibrant discourse around ways to foster and articulate research quality in qualitative and mixed-methods studies. This paper describes three engineering education scholars' engagement with a processoriented framework for interpretive research quality. Set in the context of a collaborative inquirybased approach to reflecting on and improving research practice, this paper presents five instances when we turned to the framework to address quality challenges that emerged in our own research projects. Analysis of these experiences demonstrates the exploratory and explanatory power of the existing framework. At the same time, however, our collaborative process revealed the need to consider another dimension of research quality, specifically concerned with the human experience of the researcher and the researched throughout the inquiry. In this context, we propose Ethical Validation as a validation construct that, we argue, lies at the heart of conducting and evaluating interpretive research.

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Joachim is an assistant professor of engineering education research at the University of Georgia (UGA). He is one of the leaders of the Collaborative Lounge for Understanding Society and Technology through Educational Research (CLUSTER), an interdisciplinary research group with members from engineering, art, and educational psychology.His research interests span the formation of students' professional identity, the role of reflection in engineering learning, and interpretive research methods in engineering education.He was the first international recipient of the ASEE Educational Research Methods Division's "Apprentice Faculty Award", was selected as a 2010 Frontiers in Education "New Faculty Fellow", and is currently a UGA "Lilly Teaching Fellow".His teaching focuses on innovative approaches to introducing systems thinking and creativity into the environmental engineering program. In this context, he is involved in the development and implementation of the Synthesis and Design Studio series at UGA.