Work in Progress: Making Engineering Education Teams more Effective: An Exploration of a Nearly Epistemic Negotiation

In this work-in-progress paper, we present our initial characterization of an interdisciplinary engineering education research team's culture around the generation, expression, and application of knowledge (epistemic culture). To explore this phenomenon, we used an ethnographic case study approach, focusing on a single interdisciplinary engineering education research team. We observed six recorded team meetings that occurred across four months. For each meeting, we took fieldnotes and identified any discussion about research ideas, approaches, or questions among team members (i.e., a critical interaction). In this paper, we focus on one instance in which epistemic questions were raised but there was no true negotiation of ideas. We used Longino's critical contextual empiricism model as a lens to characterize the team's epistemic culture and gain insight into an instance that was primed for epistemic negotiation. In this paper, we present our initial characterization of the team's epistemic culture and our analysis of the instance we identified. We also discuss possible barriers to teams having epistemic negotiations.