Introduction

Although globalization has been a political and economic concern for centuries (O’Leary, Orlikowski, & Yates, 2002), its impact on the engineering education community has become particularly salient since the publication of the Engineer of 2020 (National Academy of Engineering [NAE], 2003) and The World Is Flat (Friedman, 2005). These and subsequent publications (Committee on Science Engineering and Public Policy [CSEPP], 2006; Duderstadt, 2008, Engineers Against Poverty (EAP)/Institute of Education (IOE), 2008; GEEI, 2006; Grandin & Hirleman, 2009; NAE, 2005) have emphasized the critical need to train globally competent engineers. Academics, practitioners, and policymakers alike have realized that solving the critical problems facing the world today, including addressing the NAE Grand Challenges (NAE, http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/) and achieving a “better quality of life,” will require close collaboration among engineers from around the world. Not surprisingly, educational institutions are investing millions of dollars to train students for success in the globalized economy through initiatives such as study abroad. Students, in turn, are spending significant amounts of money to participate in these programs. Recent efforts to pass a study abroad bill provide still another indication of the importance of this issue at the national level (Study Abroad Bill, 2009). And from a research perspective, the National Science Foundation (NSF) itself spends upwards of $50 million each year funding international programs (Office of International Science and Engineering [OISE], 2008).

The greatest investment by far, however, has been by industry. In 2011 alone, U.S. firms spent more than $156 billion on workforce training, an average of $1,182/employee (American Society for Training & Development [ASTD], 2012). Almost 21% of that amount was spent on training people to work more effectively with others, and global issues are becoming a bigger slice of that pie amidst growing recognition that global work experiences give a boost to industry careers. It is within this context that engineering educators are trying to make an impact to better prepare future engineers for the global world of work.

Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of conducting interpretive research using qualitative and ethnographic methods. The chapter complements Chapters 27 by Case and Light and 26 by Moskal, Reed-Rhoades, and Strong in this volume, which respectively provide an overview of the different qualitative and mixed method approaches to engineering education research. The primary purpose of this chapter is to provide entry-level researchers with background information on how to conduct interpretive research. Because every researcher has his or her own “tricks of the trade,” this chap-ter necessarily presents methods and ap-proaches found useful by this author, and represents an individual perspective on interpretive research. The number of references has been limited to around fifty to avoid overwhelming the target audience; this chapter is not intended as a comprehensive review of interpretive research or of qualitative and ethnographic methods.

Interpretive Research in the Human Sciences

Social scientists currently distinguish interpretive research from other research traditions in that the researcher is taken to be a critical part of the process. The primary goal of the research is to understand participants’ meaning-making, with less emphasis on the typical flow of the scientific method followed in other research methodologies. This type of research requires an investigator to include his or her own perceptions, becoming more of a sense-maker than an objective reporter: Interpretive research is an umbrella term used to describe studies that endeavor to understand a community in terms of the actions and interaction of the participants, from their own perspectives” (Tobin, 1999, p. 487).

Introduction

There is increased concern with developing a better understanding of how people learn engineering, as prior efforts to improve engineering education have often followed an ad hoc trajectory. The field lacks a systematic understanding of how engineering learning occurs and there is a paucity of knowledge on which to draw (Felder, Sheppard, & Smith, 2005; Chapter 1 by Froyd & Lohmann, this volume). To help redress this situation, in this chapter we review scholarship on learning with the aim of building a framework that can guide future research on engineering learning. Specifically, we hope to make the case for a framework that focuses on situativity and learning in engineering settings. This chapter complements other chapters in this volume including Chapters 2 by Newstetter and Svinicki; 4 by Roth; and 5 by Streveler, Brown, Herman, and Monfort that also focus on learning.

An Introduction to Learning

During the past couple of centuries, scholars from a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and sociology have spent considerable time trying to answer questions related to learning, such as: How does cognitive development take place? How do we grow from a child with rudimentary abilities and knowledge into a highly skillful adult? How are humans able to engage in highly complex activities? Some scholars whose work has had a major influence on research on learning include Lev Vygotsky (1962, 1978), Jean Piaget (1952, 1964), John Dewey (1896, 1934), Harold Garfinkel (1967), William James (1890/1950), George Herbert Mead (1934), Gregory Bateson (1978), Michel Polanyi (1967), and Jerome Bruner (1990, 1960). Core ideas of these scholars adopted by learning researchers in their intelle-ctual and methodological trajectory include Vygotsky's cultural historical theory, Piaget's genetic epistemology, Dewey's transactional account, James's pragmatism and realism, Polanyi's tacit knowledge, and Garfinkel's ethnomethodology. These ideas have not only shaped theoretical development of the field of learning but have also influenced the design of learning environments including our schools and curricula. Many central ideas that we take for granted in educational practice, such as the progression of child development through specific stages and the value of group work and collaborative learning, can be traced back to these influential scholars.

The Cambridge Handbook of Engineering Education Research (CHEER) is an important reference source for the growing field of engineering education research (EER). EER has become an increasingly important field internationally, as evidenced by the growing prestige and subscriber base of its key journal, the Journal of Engineering Education (JEE), the founding of several Ph.D.-granting engineering education departments at prestigious institutions, and the growth of an international community of engineering education researchers who hold global meetings and have a variety of publication venues. Despite the growth of the field, there is currently no book that provides an overview of EER. Thus we proposed CHEER with the belief that it will fill an important gap internationally in the EER field and will be used as a textbook for graduate courses, a reference book by engineering faculty in disciplinary engineering areas, and a resource by policymakers, K–12 engineering curriculum designers, informal science educators, and others.

Engineering education research draws on many social science disciplines in addition to disciplinary engineering knowledge and computing. Research in engineering education has traditionally focused on reporting of classroom interventions and generally lacked definition as a discipline until the late1990s and early 2000s. Since a landmark issue of JEE in 2005, which included papers by senior scholars in the field who argued for a stronger theoretical and empirically driven agenda for the field, engineering education has quickly emerged as a research driven field and subsequently has seen a substantial increase in both the quality and quantity of theoretical and empirical work. Research in engineering education is focused primarily on formal settings but work on informal learning in settings such as museums and after school programs is starting to appear. Chapters in this volume draw extensively on contemporary research in the learning sciences to include how technology affects learners and learning environments, and the role of social context in learning.

Introduction

The focus of our chapter is on current research-based understandings of professional engineering work. We argue for the relevance of these understandings to engineering education. We will also argue, as others have as well (Barley, 2004; Trevelyan, 2007, 2010; Vinck, 2003), that research on professional engineering work is too sparse. Therefore a good part of this chapter is oriented in a programmatic, agenda setting direction.

From the perspective of engineering education, the sparseness of research on professional engineering work is puzzling for a number of reasons. First, engineering education is often reorganized against the backdrop of claims about what professional engineering work is now or will be in the future. Without trustworthy and specific representations of engineering work practice and of the dispositions, skills, and identity orientations of professional engineers, how are engineering educators to know whether engineering education is preparing engineering students to be successful, creative, or impactful engineers? A prominent consensus report from the National Academy of Engineering highlights a “disconnect between engineers in practice and engineers in academe” (National Academy of Engineering [NAE], 2005, pp. 20–21). The report stated that “the great majority of engineering faculty, for example, have no industry experience. Industry representatives point to this disconnect as the reason that engineering students are not adequately prepared, in their view, to enter today's workforce” (National Academy of Engineering [NAE], 2005, pp. 20–21). It is important that a focus on “preparation” of future engineers not be tied to an agenda that solely emphasizes what professional engineering “needs” and economic competitiveness. It also is possible to organize an engineering educational system to prepare recent graduates to be change agents and participants in new social movements within engineering work practice. However, in either case, concrete images of engineering work are critical resources for rethinking engineering education and making empirically based assessments of progress.