Special session - communities of practice in engineering education: How do we investigate diversity and global engineering?

In today's context, we are all challenged to consider issues of diversity and global engineering in the context of engineering education. However, little explicit guidance has been given on how to conceptualize diversity and global engineering in meaningful ways, and how to develop research questions that allow us to rigorously investigate the issues at hand. This session will provide an interactive forum for exploring those questions, finding answers collaboratively, and moving one's own work forward. To anchor the forum, we will draw on the experiences of engineering faculty and graduate students who participated in a year-long engineering education research program, the Institute for Scholarship on Engineering Education (ISEE). The session will build on a similar session offered at the 2005 FIE conference to expand the growing engineering education research community, extend the knowledge-generating work begun in the 2005 session, and add two new components: 1) a focus on the process of developing and refining a research question, and 2) an emphasis on studying diversity and global engineering issues.