Hidden barriers to academic staff engaging in Engineering Education Research

At Swinburne University of Technology, the Faculty of Engineering and Industrial Sciences (FEIS) has charged the Engineering and Science Education Research (ESER) group with facilitating change to increase the level of engineering education research within FEIS. This paper reports on the first of a two-stage project, with the research question: How can the barriers to academic staff undertaking engineering education research be usefully conceived and framed to assist academics (and those supporting them) to overcome those barriers? Data was collected using critical reflection and dialogue in reference to the literature. Our findings suggest that barriers can at times be tacit, murky and unnamed-effectively hidden. This paper argues that to support staff to engage in education research and scholarship there is a need to understand and address not only institutional barriers, but also underlying, hidden barriers. This paper proposes an approach to such barriers and describes future research.