Representing Researcher Identity with I-Poems

Alexis Gillmore; Courtney June Faber

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Conference: 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Portland, Oregon
Publication Date: June 23, 2024
Start Date: June 23, 2024
End Date: July 12, 2024
Conference Session: Educational Research and Methods Division (ERM) Technical Session 12
Tagged Division: Educational Research and Methods Division (ERM)
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/47941

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Paper Authors

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Alexis Gillmore University of Tennessee, Knoxville orcid.org/0000-0001-8042-5620

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Alexis is a PhD student in soil science - they also teach interdisciplinary senior design and are pursuing a certificate in engineering education. Alexis is interested in developing participatory research strategies to make scientific knowledge that is useful and usable to those who need it.

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biography

Courtney June Faber University at Buffalo, The State University of New York orcid.org/0000-0001-9156-7616

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Courtney Faber, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Engineering Education at the University at Buffalo (UB). Prior to joining UB in August of 2023, she was a Research Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in Engineering Fundamentals at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She was also the Director of the Fundamentals of Engineering and Computing Teaching in Higher Education Certificate Program. Her research focuses on empowering engineering education scholars to be more effective at impacting transformational change in engineering and developing educational experiences that consider epistemic thinking. She develops and uses innovative research methods that allow for deep investigations of constructs such as epistemic thinking, identity, and agency. Dr. Faber has a B.S. in Bioengineering and a Ph.D. in Engineering and Science Education from Clemson University and a M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Cornell University. Among other awards for her research, she was awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2022 to study epistemic negotiations on interdisciplinary engineering education research teams.

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Abstract

In this methods paper, we describe the use of participant-generated I-poems as a tool to represent data from qualitative interviews. I-poems are poems composed of I-statements a participant made during an interview. This form of qualitative analysis highlights a participant’s voice and self-focused statements within a text. For our study, we adapted the I-poem method so that participants created an I-poem themselves from their interview transcripts to represent their researcher identities. It was important to us to use a participatory method of analysis because it gave participants agency in how their identities were interpreted and expressed. We believe participant-generated I-poems will be useful for researchers who want to learn about participants’ beliefs in their own terms or those who want to use participants’ knowledge as a lens to analyze the qualitative data they help produce. To that end, we discuss the methods and results of our study using I-poems to represent researcher identity as a case study to show how the participant-generated I-poem method can be used to analyze interview data in a new way. We recommend applying I-poems to other engineering education research agendas.

After the interview, participants were provided with their interview transcript to review and modify as needed. In a second meeting, participants created the poems themselves from their interview transcripts: each participant selected which of their statements to include to create a poem that represented who they are as a researcher on their team. The first author was present during the poem session to answer questions. After participants finished creating their poem, the first author asked them to share it and then asked reflection questions related to the content and construction of the poem (ex. “what does your poem say about who you are as a researcher?” and “how did you go about creating your poem?”).

In this paper, we describe how we operationalized the I-poem method to address our research question and discuss how participants’ poems related to our theory of researcher identity. We compare I-statements that were included in I-poems to those that were left out. We also make recommendations for applying I-poems to other engineering education research agendas.

Citation
Format

Gillmore, A., & Faber, C. J. (2024, June), Representing Researcher Identity with I-Poems Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://peer.asee.org/47941

TY - CPAPER
AB - In this methods paper, we describe the use of participant-generated I-poems as a tool to represent data from qualitative interviews. I-poems are poems composed of I-statements a participant made during an interview. This form of qualitative analysis highlights a participant’s voice and self-focused statements within a text. For our study, we adapted the I-poem method so that participants created an I-poem themselves from their interview transcripts to represent their researcher identities. It was important to us to use a participatory method of analysis because it gave participants agency in how their identities were interpreted and expressed. We believe participant-generated I-poems will be useful for researchers who want to learn about participants’ beliefs in their own terms or those who want to use participants’ knowledge as a lens to analyze the qualitative data they help produce. To that end, we discuss the methods and results of our study using I-poems to represent researcher identity as a case study to show how the participant-generated I-poem method can be used to analyze interview data in a new way. We recommend applying I-poems to other engineering education research agendas.

After the interview, participants were provided with their interview transcript to review and modify as needed. In a second meeting, participants created the poems themselves from their interview transcripts: each participant selected which of their statements to include to create a poem that represented who they are as a researcher on their team. The first author was present during the poem session to answer questions. After participants finished creating their poem, the first author asked them to share it and then asked reflection questions related to the content and construction of the poem (ex. “what does your poem say about who you are as a researcher?” and “how did you go about creating your poem?”).

In this paper, we describe how we operationalized the I-poem method to address our research question and discuss how participants’ poems related to our theory of researcher identity. We compare I-statements that were included in I-poems to those that were left out. We also make recommendations for applying I-poems to other engineering education research agendas.
AU - Alexis Gillmore
AU - Courtney June Faber
CY - Portland, Oregon
DA - 2024/06/23
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Representing Researcher Identity with I-Poems
UR - https://peer.asee.org/47941
ER -