"Leadership as an Alienating Social Myth": Disciplinary fissures as a catalyst to interdisciplinary understanding

As an interdisciplinary field, engineering education involves regular interaction between people trained in the social sciences, humanities, and engineering.What happens when professors, staff, and students socialized in disciplines with distinct epistemic traditions come together to educate the next generation?In this paper, I reflect on my experience as a social science researcher working in engineering education, using five moments of disciplinary confusion to trace my steep learning curve.These five moments taught me about paradigm shifts, acceptable sources of research funding, research ethics, learning styles, and methodological credibility in engineering education.While engineering education may be interdisciplinary in name, I argue it that it remains a multidisciplinary field with transdisciplinary ambitions.I punctuate this analysis with implications for engineering education researchers interested in using disciplinary fissures as a catalyst for meaningful, interdisciplinary collaboration and understanding.