ISBN: 0-87823-193-5 ©2007 ASEE June 22 – 24, 2007, Honolulu, HI 1 st International Conference on Research in Engineering Education Page 1 of 9 Becoming an Engineering Education Researcher: Intersections, Extensions, and Lessons Learned Among Three Researchers’ Stories Robin Adams 1 , Lorraine Fleming 2 , and Karl Smith 3 1 Robin Adams, Engineering Education, Purdue University, rsadams@purdue.edu 2 Lorraine Fleming, Civil Engineering, Howard University, 3 Karl Smith, Engineering Education, Purdue University, smith511@purdue.edu Abstract - Engineering education is an emerging discipline, and the number of people choosing this career path is increasing. What pathways might we navigate on our way to becoming an engineering education researcher? How can we investigate these pathways and what could we learn? In this paper we explore intersections, extensions, and lessons learned among three stories of becoming an engineering education researcher. We present these stories to facilitate scholarly discourse on pathways for becoming engineering education researchers and to seed the generation of a broader palette of stories through the reader’s self-reflection on their own pathways. The theoretical framework for the article is Bruner’s (1991) “The narrative construction of reality.” Narrative, through storytelling, is used as a method of inquiry to enable shared meaning making and common ground within a community of practice. In this paper, each author presents their story or personal journey of becoming an engineering education researcher in their own voice. By bringing the reader into our stories we seek to make visible and shared what we are collectively learning and to invite the reader to reflect on their own stories. For example, we observed many themes among our stories. Key among these is that we each began with a burning question that needed inquiry beyond our own sphere of expertise, and that (regardless of how long we’ve been on our paths) we see our journeys as ongoing. We conclude the paper with a discussion on potential roles for storytelling for building capacity in engineering education research. Index Terms – engineering education research, narrative, pathways INTRODUCTION "We should look inward and think about the meaning of our life and its purposes, lest we do it in 20 or 30 years and it's too late." Robert Coles There is a dearth of examples in the literature of engineering faculty members making a transition or, more specifically, embracing engineering education research. Among the few examples we found are Balancing Acts: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Academic Careers (Huber, 2004), in which four faculty members (of which one is an engineering educator) present their stories of transitioning from a more traditional view on scholarship to one that encompasses the integration of teaching and learning. Similarly, the biographies and intellectual histories of thirty- five academic women who broke new ground are presented in Academic Pathfinders: Knowledge Creation and Feminist Scholarship (Gumport, 2002). Bateson’s (2000) Composing a life also includes fascinating stories of women on an academic path. At the same time, there is considerable interest within the engineering education research community for sharing and hearing the stories of others (Adams et al, 2007). Since there are few, if any, stories of engineering faculty making the transition to engineering education researcher in the literature we offer our stories to enable scholarly discourse and hope that they will encourage others to share their own stories in making such a transition. We open with our personal connections to the role of stories in engineering education, an overview of theoretical frameworks on the role of narrative and a transition to developing engineering education researchers (i.e., finding their voice and telling their story). We then offer our stories in their original narrative form, discuss themes that emerged, and offer suggestions for others who are navigating engineering education researcher pathways. We conclude by summarizing the ways in which storytelling and narrative can play a role in facilitating engineering education research as a professional endeavor. Each of us has been interested in the role of narrative. In 1998 Karl wrote a Journal of Engineering Education Academic Bookshelf column entitled “That reminds me of a story: The role of narrative in engineering education (Smith, 1998).” Although he had been interested in the role of narrative for some time, he was reluctant to submit a column on stories. Interestingly, he got more responses to that column than to any other of the 12 or so Academic Bookshelf columns he wrote. Robin has been exploring the role of storytelling in engineering education from both a pedagogical and research perspective. With her colleagues from the Institute for Scholarship on Engineering Education (ISEE), she co- developed an interactive story poster session for helping