WIP: Understanding Emotional and Transformative Journeys in a First Year Engineering Program

First year engineering experiences provide unique cognitive and emotional challenges, that help first year students to venture outside their comfort zones. These challenges act as “disorienting dilemmas” which help in initiating transformative learning by compelling students to critically self-reflect and reassess their assumptions, beliefs, and values. This self-introspection may trigger emotional responses or discomfort in students during their first-year experience. The study is motivated to explore the unique interplay between students' emotional journey and transformative journey during first year experiences. Hence, this research to practice paper aims to explore the role of emotions in a first-year engineering program using Mezirow's transformative learning theory (1990) and Russell's Circumplex model of affect (1980) as our guiding theoretical frameworks. Data was collected through surveys from first-year engineering students in an Engineering Design Thinking course at the end of their second semester. The study utilizes quantitative methods to analyze the data, and preliminary results show that students who attained a transformed perspective and were more likely to take reflective actions, were less likely to feel bored and more likely to feel engaged in their first-year experience.