Becoming engineering education researchers: reflective identity navigation in postgraduate researcher development

Postgraduate researchers entering engineering education research (EER) from engineering practice, teaching, or professional backgrounds often renegotiate identity and ways of knowing. This collaborative autoethnographic study examines how structured reflection and peer/facilitated dialogue mediated that transition for six early-stage postgraduate researchers in one multinational African cohort at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Drawing on reflective journals and two peer-dialogue sessions, we identify five interrelated identity-navigation processes: epistemological and identity unsettlement; reflective sense-making; repositioning prior professional identities; developing scholarly voice; and recognition and collective sense-making. We define reflective identity navigation as the recursive work through which researchers interpret unsettlement, reposition prior identities, develop warranted scholarly claims, and negotiate recognition through reflection and dialogue. The Reflective Identity Navigation (RIN) Model connects these processes and proposes that new tasks and feedback may reactivate them. It offers a situated conceptual resource for analysing and supporting postgraduate researcher development without assuming a universal sequence.