Knowing Our Story: Framing a Cooperative Inquiry Project to Explore the Personal Growth of Graduate Students in Engineering Education

Topics: Graduate student needs and experiences; Mentoring graduate students; graduate student learning experience on becoming an engineering education researcher Doctoral education is often described by faculty and graduate students as “a journey”, “a learning process”, and “a transformative experience”. These descriptions speak to the experiential nature of doctoral education which aims at bringing about some change in students to prepare them for their future career. In the research literature, the path and process of becoming an engineering education researcher is an emerging field. In this paper, we present the framing of a co-operative inquiry project to explore our personal growth as graduate students. Co-operative inquiry is a research method in which multiple people share and explore a topic from their own perspectives through collective dialogue, reflection, interrogation, and transformation. Our co-operative inquiry group consisted of the authors of this paper as co-researchers and co-subjects and is situated in our shared interest in graduate education and learning. While we are at different stages of the doctoral program, we have the mutual experience of completing the first year of the program at the same institution. We engaged in co-operative inquiry sessions, focused on learning within ourselves and with others, to make new meaning from our experiences. Reflections during the formative first year of doctoral training were explored as well as reflections and memos generated as part of the inquiry process. Through the co-operative inquiry process, this study offers insight into opportunities for peer-to-peer mentorship and learning enrichment in graduate studies. Our insight may support graduate students in discovering and charting their own personal journeys of learning and development in engineering education research. Our future work will be guided by our co-operative inquiry process and structure, with a focus on delving deeper into the aspects that make up our personal and collective story.