At the Intersection of Engineering Education and Educational Ethnography: Unanticipated Challenges in an Interdisciplinary Research Alliance

• In Event: 61.046 - Uncovering Intellectual and Conceptual Underpinnings of Innovative and Nontraditional Contexts for Learning Across Disciplines

Abstract

This study examines how interdisciplinary (i.e., Engineering Education and Educational Ethnography) and inter-institutional (i.e., Private University and Public University in California) collaboration developed through longitudinal dialogues (2012-present) focusing on the design processes of an innovative undergraduate course through an international alliance in Engineering education. In this course, faculty and students were gathered from three countries (i.e., Beijing, Taiwan, USA/California) to participate in the common course, while using technology to enable interactive work of the instructor with students, students with class resources, and students with other students in local and cross-national configurations in tasks, concluding with a face-to-face collaboration in Taiwan (Figure 1).
The interdisciplinary dialogic research alliance between the Engineering Education team and Educational Ethnographic team was initiated to explore what counted as opportunities for learning in the no-distance educational contexts of the course, and how these opportunities were supported by innovative, pedagogical processes and practices distinct from traditional lecture format approaches. Underlying this collaboration was a series of conceptual arguments about how to explore teaching-learning relationships, while exchanging and integrating concepts and epistemologies from the partners’ disciplines for the purposes of mutual enrichment. We explored how intercultural communication contexts (Scollon, Scollon & Jones, 2012) were jointly constructed, in which each team was understood as a languaculture (Agar, 1994; 2006). Agar’s argument on the interdependence of “language” and “culture” framed our view of each discipline involved in the research alliance (Agar, 1994). This languaculture framework was also applied to students’ disciplinary backgrounds (e.g., engineering, business, humanities, and social sciences) and pertinent to the ongoing dialogues among research alliance members. In order to fulfill the goals of the interdisciplinary research alliance, an iterative, recursive and abductive process of dialogue, data collection and data analysis was undertaken (Figure 2).
Analyses showed that each member of the research alliance brought linguistic, cultural and social presuppositions from their own disciplines to study what counts as learning and what learning counts (Heap, 1980; 1991). Analysis also showed a dynamic and unanticipated effect of the dialogues on the conceptual understanding of teaching-learning relationships. For example, the engineering educators reformulated the ways in which they viewed learning and culture through these dialogues, and the education ethnographers develop new understanding of what counts as design thinking in engineering.
Together these points of reformulation led to new ways of studying intercultural communication in complex social situations in higher education, and made visible how and in what ways this interdisciplinary research alliance created new possibilities for developing mutual goals and for constructing warranted accounts of learning through transdisciplinary dialogues about research.

Authors

• Jenna Joo, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Yun Dai, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Edward A. Williams

• Stephen Lu, University of Southern California

• Ang Liu, University of Southern California