Qualitative Engineering Education Researchers and our Relationships with Data: Exploring our Epistemologies and Values as a Community

Abstract

ASU). She is a faculty in the Engineering Education Systems and Design (EESD) PhD program and currently advises three doctoral students. Dr. Kellam is an engineering education researcher and a mechanical engineer. She is also deputy editor of the Journal of Engineering Education and co-chair of the newly formed American Society of Engineering Education's Committee on Scholarly Publications. In her research she is broadly interested in developing critical understandings of the culture of engineering education and, especially, the experiences of marginalized undergraduate engineering students and engineering educators. She is a qualitative researcher who uses narrative research methods and positioning theory to understand undergraduate student and faculty member's experiences in engineering education. Madeleine Jennings (Student)Madeleine Jennings (they/them) is a Ph.D. student at Arizona State University in the Engineering Education Systems & Design program. Their research focuses on the critical assessment of the engineering institution's role within the neoliberal US nation-state. They also research the experiences of marginalized communities within the US engineering institution with a focus on the LGBTQIA+ community.

Continuity and Communication Across an Epistemologically Heterogenous Research Community: A Response to Kellam and Jennings (2021)

“…As a qualitative researcher, I particularly enjoyed reading authors Nadia Kellam and Madeleine Jennings's commentaries on the state of qualitative research in engineering education. Kellam and Jennings have a paper in ASEE considering the utility and implications of choosing different sized "n's" in qualitative papers (Kellam & Jennings, 2022); in their Studies in Engineering Education paper, Kellam and Jennings (2021) look at the epistemologies implied through the author voice and research design of qualitative research.…”