Characteristics of Successful Cross-disciplinary Engineering Education Collaborations

Journal of Engineering Education, Apr 2008 by Borrego, Maura, Newswander, Lynita K

ABSTRACT

This article employs theory to demonstrate the characteristics of successful cross-disciplinary engineering education collaborations. Specifically, we analyzed data from interviews with 24 recent Journal of Engineering Education authors from engineer-nonengineer teams. Theoretical frameworks from education and psychology are used to ground the results and contribute to broader research on collaboration across technology and social science disciplines. The data suggest that the way an individual understands and appreciates the nature of knowledge affects the way he or she collaborates with colleagues in different academic disciplines, especially when the disciplines are fundamentally different. Although the literature criticizes engineers for not understanding or respecting other viewpoints, we found that nine engineers and eight nonengineers articulated awareness of their collaborators' perspectives, worked to integrate these into the research, and noted increased satisfaction and quality of work as a result. Recommendations for fostering this type of interdisciplinary integration in engineering education are offered along with suggestions for future research.

Keywords: epistemology, faculty, interdisciplinary collaboration

I. INTRODUCTION

With only a handful of individuals currently trained in engineering and education traditions, engineering education research currently relies on collaboration between engineers and social scientists (including educational researchers). At the 2006 ASEE annual conference plenary, Journal of Engineering Education (JEE) editor Jack Lohmann stated that in recent years, JEE's acceptance rate has been 20-30 percent when a social scientist is a member of the author team, but only 2-3 percent if the authors were all engineers-a difference in acceptance rate of a full order of magnitude. Similarly, the National Science Foundation's Engineering Education programs called PD 05-1340 (National Science Foundation, 2007) states, "It is expected that successful proposals will most likely be comprised of multidisciplinary teams of engineers and other fields that bring expertise pertinent to learning research." Even as new Ph.D. graduates trained specifically in engineering education emerge, collaborations that cross disciplinary lines will continue to be a critical component of engineering education research.

Despite these and other motivators of cross-disciplinary research, boundaries between academic disciplines still pose problems for those who wish to try their hand at it. These roadblocks include promotion and tenure requirements and department politics on one level, and communication and competing truth claims on another. While a number of publications provide anecdotal evidence of these difficulties, surprisingly few published empirical studies focus on cross-disciplinary collaboration processes (see Klein, 1990; Rhoten, 2003; Rossini et al., 1979, for empirical studies).

Although practical difficulties like differences in terminology are commonly cited in discussions of collaboration, research on disciplinary differences reveals more fundamental variation in the ways individuals in various disciplines discuss problems and value knowledge. The combination of disciplines can also affect how closely collaborators work together, we and others argue that the level of integration for a collaborative project can be a predictor of the quality of the final product (Boix-Mansilla and Gardner, 2006). Most people will agree that researchers from other disciplines "see" things differently, but by understanding the underlying differences and how these can expand possibilities for research, would-be collaborators can learn lessons invaluable to cooperation, communication, and ultimate understanding. The Research Agenda for Engineering Education specifically cites engineering epistemology as a key area for future research, and goes so far as to initiate a "call to the nation" to answer the problems of engineering education through research of "the historical, contextual, and philosophical" dimensions of engineering epistemology both in practice and among faculty (The National Engineering Education Research Colloquies, 2006). In the process of such learning, students, practicing engineers, and faculty are likely to develop higher quality products as a result of more fully integrated perspectives.

Thus, the purpose of this project is to better understand cross-disciplinary collaboration in engineering education research for the purpose of facilitating increased collaboration between engineers and nonengineers. As demonstrated in the results and discussion, this research contributes to both theory and practice in the specific setting of engineering education, as well as the larger body of empirical research on interdisciplinary collaboration and theories of interdisaplinarity and epistemology. The following questions guided this research:

1. What models and procedures do engineer-nonengineer collaborators employ in productive engineering education collaborations? Specifically, how do they find collaborators? What structure do their interactions take? How do they share or divide the workload?