James Huff, a leading researcher in engineering education, will present insights from his Beyond Professional Identity (BPI) lab on Nov. 7th. Explore how his transformative work on identity, professional shame, and academic well-being seeks to build compassion in engineering cultures.
Thursday, Nov. 7th 2-3 pm CT
Kiewitt Hall A251 or via Zoom
Title:
Moving beyond professional identity development to advance care for and from the whole engineer
Summary:
In this seminar, Dr. Huff will illustrate the Beyond Professional Identity (BPI) lab's active engineering education research that aims to transform cultures of engineering to be compassionate toward humanity. By establishing theoretical and methodological ways to access psychological phenomena that are often hidden in professional domains, we can change the ways that engineering faculty, students, and professionals inter-personally relate to those within and outside engineering by altering the ways that they intra-personally understand who they are—their identities—in the context of their professions. In this seminar, Dr. Huff discusses four strands of research that support this career mission: 1) quality in interpretive research, 2) personal identity in professional settings, 3) professional shame in engineering, and 4) academic well-being in engineering faculty. He will demonstrate how activity in these four strands of research coalesce to create a clarified vision of how engineers could emanate and experience care in the context of their professions.
Bio for James Huff:
Dr. James Huff is an Associate Professor within the Engineering Education Transformations Institute and School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Additionally, he holds multiple courtesy affiliations at Clemson University (Engineering and Science Education), Harding University (Honors College), Oregon State University (Civil and Construction Engineering), and the University of Johannesburg (Psychology). Dr. Huff serves as a Senior Associate Editor with the Journal of Engineering Education and Chair of the Education Research and Methods Division in the American Society for Engineering Education. He earned his Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Purdue University, his M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue, and his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Harding.
Dr. Huff is a qualitative researcher whose work lies at the interdisciplinary nexus of engineering education research and applied personality and social psychology. An NSF CAREER Awardee, he is committed to fostering care as a central mindset of engineering and other professions through his in-depth examinations of personal lived experiences of identity and emotion, facets often hidden within professional domains. As Principal Investigator of the Beyond Professional Identity lab, Dr. Huff has mentored undergraduates, doctoral students, and professionals from over fifteen disciplines in conducting their qualitative investigations on psychological phenomena relevant to equity and well-being in workplaces and degree programs. He has published numerous peer-reviewed publications, and has facilitated multiple workshops on qualitative research methodologies and coping with professional shame.
Learn more about James Huff and his research at his Beyond Professional Identity (BPI) Lab website