This Research Full Paper examines the concept of flow, derived from Zen philosophy and positive psychology, and how interdisciplinary STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) and disciplinary electrical engineering students find flow within their coursework and their capstone design experiences. STEAM education incorporates the arts and humanities into the traditional disciplines of STEM. However, students involved in this interdisciplinary space often struggle to find a balance in applying both creative and logical knowledge in their work. The theoretical framework for this study leverages the concept of pure experience from Zen philosophy to analyze flow states in students' interdisciplinary experiences. This theory focuses on the unity of subject/object and rejection of purely logical, positivist thinking for more integrative knowledge acquisition while in flow states. In this secondary analysis, we analyzed interviews conducted with electrical engineering and STEAM students. STEAM students from an interdisciplinary program were found to approach their coursework differently than engineering students, likely because of a difference in assignment guidelines. The engineering students in the study had more restrictive guidelines, while the STEAM students were given more freedom to move between disciplines. Alternatively, students from both disciplines shared many similar values about education and knowledge including the need for enjoyment and personal interest within the coursework as well as finding a balance between logical thought and the desire for creation that a student's program did not determine whether they reached a state of pure experience, or flow, in their work. However, rigid adherence to either the arts or engineering seemed to create disharmony and very few students find cohesion between their values and their approach to knowledge. This paper points to new insights into the design of capstone experiences for STEAM education.

This work-in-progress briefly outlines the theoretical background, methods, and preliminary results of a qualitative study conducted with gender, romantic, and sexual minority (GRSM) students immersed in higher education spaces. We elaborate on the efficacy of our innovative qualitative methodologies through the use of AI-human art-making interactions during our interviews, which helped to produce richer qualitative data from our participants. Our methodology was constructed using a Foucauldian theoretical framework to inform the framework of this study, focusing explicitly on GRSM students' experiences with power in higher education and when using technology, as well as the ways in which they resist power through the use of technology and AI -generated visual media.

This innovative practice work in progress (WIP) paper details the development of an observation protocol that was developed to promote pedagogical risk-taking and additive innovation. Our higher level goal is to create a self-sustaining community of pedagogical exploration through formative feedback driven by peer observation. This effort aims to break the mold of status quo professional development protocols with questions specifically designed to ensure educators are receiving targeted, desired feedback, while engaging observers to think about how they might apply something similar in their own classroom(s). Attempts to test this protocol unearthed deeper concerns about observations and faculty reluctance to be observed. This underlying anxiety and concern associated with observations needs to be addressed, particularly during the pandemic. In this paper we share our process of developing this protocol, our pilot testing of the protocol, barriers encountered in further testing of the protocol, and literature that explains faculty reluctance to peer observation protocols that will help guide future efforts.

This workshop invites discussion about peer review of journal manuscripts in the field of engineering education. The aim is to generate advice for reviewers on how to make effective reviews, which can help editors make appropriate decisions and support authors in improving their manuscripts. The workshop is facilitated by editors of three leading engineering education journals.

This special session invites scholarly educators and engineering education researchers to learn about nascent research and innovative practice possibilities related to emotions in engineering education. Through an interactive session, facilitators will guide participants into developing their own thinking in relation to how emotions can shed novel insight on innovative teaching solutions and educational research. We have designed the special session to catalyze community around this topical interest for both education researchers and scholarly educators.

We (the facilitators) work as social scientists and engineering education researchers from different universities on the NSF-supported program, Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) ( https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2017/nsf17501/nsf17501.htm ). We began to notice how power and privilege were enacted on our teams, which consisted of diverse team members (e.g., diverse in disciplinary affiliation, role in the university, gender, race, LGBTQIA+ status). This motivated a research project and workshops/special sessions such as the one proposed here, where we explore how power and privilege are enacted within interdisciplinary teams so that we can begin to dismantle systemic oppressions within academia [1] , [2] . The POWER special session (Privilege and Oppression: Working for Equitable Recourse) was developed to guide engineering educators to identify and understand the intersectional nature of power and privilege before planning strategies to disrupt, disarm, and dismantle it.

The need for increasing diversity in engineering has paved the road for a rich wealth of literature exploring the experiences of marginalized students in these spaces. Much of this literature utilizes qualitative methodology to understand the experiences of these students, as told through their own words. However, work of this nature can often be influenced by the implicit biases that the researcher carries, as well as the inherent misalignment of power present between researcher and participant. These misalignments may be exacerbated when the researcher is interviewing a marginalized participant, while not identifying as part of a marginalized identity themselves. Students within the LGBTQ+ community may reside at multiple marginalized identities, and as such, the issues surrounding interviewing marginalized identities can be compounded further. Even the most well-intentioned and experienced researcher may find themselves in an interview with a marginalized individual in which implicit biases and unspoken power structures alter the trajectory of the interview. This paper seeks to provide an auto-ethnographic reflection by the first author on the interview of a transgender research participant, while simultaneously providing an opportunity to identify ways in which her interview could have been methodologically improved. This will be accomplished by the first author's analysis of the interview and meta-data. This analysis is valuable, as the first author identifies as a member of the LGBTQ+ engineering community herself.

This Work in Progress Paper presents an NSF-funded study focused on understanding the role that makerspaces play in the identity development of engineering students from underrepresented groups (URGs). In recent years, makerspaces have become a popular addition to universities, with an implicit assumption that makerspaces will increase students choosing to major in STEM disciplines. The research question that guided this work is the following: How well do I-poems and thematic analysis help us uncover complex and nuanced understandings of the identities of engineering students and makers who are from URGs? For this paper, we share a passage from an interview and conduct an analysis of that passage using the I-poem analytic strategy and thematic analysis. In particular, we explore the possibilities inherent in using these analytic approaches to understand identity development. We discuss how the I-poem was effective in developing a more complex and nuanced understanding of the identity development of engineering student makers. Further implications of this novel approach are that I-poems show promise to resonate better with the reader and position the researcher and reader as `standing alongside' the participant, instead of a more traditional approach of `gazing at' our participants.

This Work in Progress Paper presents the creation of a codebook that will support a broader study focused on understanding the experiences of veterans with service-connected disabilities as they transition from the military into an undergraduate engineering program. Military careers and engineering student life have stark differences. This exploratory research study aims to develop a deeper understanding of the experiences of engineering student veterans with service-connected disabilities as they transition into higher education. To investigate these transitions, we utilized semi-structured narrative interviews with three sophomore engineering students with disabilities. The participants were purposively selected for maximum variability across particular demographic characteristics. In this thematic analysis, we explored the rich narratives of the students' transitions from military members to undergraduate engineering students by coding the data and organizing the themes as they mapped to the Schlossberg Transition Theory. Further analysis of the data resulted in a codebook consisting of eight codes - two referring to one's self, three that characterize the transitional situation, one aligned with effective social support, and two codes denoting strategies these student veterans use to overcome the unique challenges associated with their transition from military member to engineering academic. The codebook will be presented in this paper.

This Research Work in Progress Paper presents a pilot study focused on understanding how faculty take pedagogical risks in 2nd and 3rd year (mezzanine level) engineering courses. Broadly, we are interested in understanding ways of making widespread changes in the mezzanine level of the curriculum. The purpose of this exploratory research is to develop an understanding of faculty pedagogical risk-taking through observations, interviews, and artifact analysis. The primary data for this project are observations of four mezzanine level engineering courses. During the observation we took detailed field notes and collected course handouts, lesson plans, or other course materials. After the lesson was completed, we conducted a post-observation teacher interview to learn about the broader context of that lesson within the class, how the lesson has evolved over time, and plans for that lesson in future courses. This work in progress serves as a pilot study to better understand how to capture pedagogical risk-taking in the classroom. Analysis of observations, field notes, and course material is being utilized to develop data collection techniques and investigation protocols for the future exploration of pedagogical risk-taking.