Becoming an engineering education researcher: Intersections, extensions, and lessons learned among three researchers' stories

Engineering education is an emerging discipline, and the number of people choosing this career path is increasing. What pathways might we navigate on our way to becoming an engineering education researcher? How can we investigate these pathways and what could we learn? In this paper we explore intersections, extensions, and lessons learned among three stories of becoming an engineering education researcher. We present these stories to facilitate scholarly discourse on pathways for becoming engineering education researchers and to seed the generation of a broader palette of stories through the reader's self-reflection on their own pathways. The theoretical framework for the article is Bruner's (1991) "The narrative construction of reality." Narrative, through storytelling, is used as a method of inquiry to enable shared meaning making and common ground within a community of practice. In this paper, each author presents their story or personal journey of becoming an engineering education researcher in their own voice. By bringing the reader into our stories we seek to make visible and shared what we are collectively learning and to invite the reader to reflect on their own stories. For example, we observed many themes among our stories. Key among these is that we each began with a burning question that needed inquiry beyond our own sphere of expertise, and that (regardless of how long we've been on our paths) we see our journeys as ongoing. We conclude the paper with a discussion on potential roles for storytelling for building capacity in engineering education research.