Ways of experiencing engineering education: a phenomenographic meta-data analysis

Phenomenography is a qualitative research approach used in engineering education research to investigate how students experience learning. This article presents a systematic meta-data analysis of 47 phenomenographic studies of engineering education published between 1993 and 2023, synthesising their results into a single outcome space. Grounded in phenomenography’s non-dualistic view of learning, our re-analysis identifies six hierarchically related ways of experiencing engineering education: reproduction, application of skills, understanding concepts, transforming knowledge, personal growth, and civic accountability. These categories are structured through interwoven dimensions of variation, depicting engineering education as a relational phenomenon in which shifts in awareness reconfigure how knowledge, practice, identity, and society are understood. The resulting framework offers researchers and educators a tool for interpreting student learning in engineering and demonstrates the value of phenomenography and variation theory for engineering education research.