Work in Progress: Exploring Epistemic Identity to Support How Engineering Education Research Teams Negotiate Epistemic Differences

This work-in-progress research paper describes the epistemic identity of one researcher, Dr. Roberts, working on an interdisciplinary engineering education research team. Engineering education research is an interdisciplinary field that includes researchers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds who each bring their own approaches to the generation, expression, and application of knowledge. These different epistemic identities can lead to tensions that prevent teams from having their desired impact. Our data includes a transcript from a 60-minute semi-structured interview. During the interview, we asked questions to explore specific aspects of Dr. Roberts' epistemic identity, the approaches he used to navigate differences in thinking, and instances of epistemic negotiation in the research team meetings. This data was analyzed using an open coding process defined by Charmaz (2014) followed by the construction of a memo to describe Dr. Roberts' epistemic identity. We describe the results from our initial analysis of Dr. Roberts' epistemic identity.