Teaching engineering/engineering teaching: interdisciplinary collaboration and the construction of academic identities

Academics in higher education institutions are members of disciplinary communities by virtue of their qualifications and research activities, and as teachers of particular disciplines (or professions) they are (or need to become) members of a community of educational practitioners. In this paper, I analyse the ways in which a small group of lecturers in a professional engineering discipline negotiated their academic identities in the process of attaining a Masters degree in Engineering Education. A series of narrative interviews was used to track shifts in the lecturers’ identity trajectories during the Masters programme. The findings indicate that academic identities, even within a single engineering discipline, are flexible, multi-layered, and susceptible to different degrees of change. Despite these differences, all participants experienced similar stages in the process of shifting from engineering to engineering educator identities. Keywords: engineering educationacademic identitiesprofessional development Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Professor Paul Trowler for his insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper. He would also like to acknowledge the feedback from the two anonymous reviewers, whose critical comments helped him to re-shape this paper.