In addition to the limitations inherent to our research, we encourage readers to keep our own positionality as authors in mind when engaging with this work (Secules et al., 2021 (link)). One of our co-authors (JFR) was an original developer of the Freeform environment, and our team has been conducting research within the context of Freeform for more than 5 years. As such, we have developed understandings and expectations regarding its effects on student experience. We have no doubt that, despite our best efforts to bracket our assumptions (Fischer, 2009 (link)), our research and later findings will be colored by these previous research efforts. We recommend that readers contextualize this study within prior findings as they interpret and apply our results to their own contexts.
Our current interest in students’ experience and agency has taken years to develop. Research regarding Freeform has slowly shifted from early efforts centered on program development and evaluation to a more nuanced, intentional, and empathetic engagement with student experience. As tenure-track faculty (all PUWL faculty members were tenured at the time of writing), researchers, and former undergraduate students ourselves, we are each invested in the effort to better understand and improve the learning experiences of engineering undergraduates. However, due to our positions as paid researchers at a research-intensive university, we necessarily inhabit a position of privilege and perceived authority in our interactions with student (and perhaps faculty) participants. In addition, most of our team identifies as white or as men, labels which bear their own inherent privilege. The ramifications of this privilege and perceived power naturally extend to the collection of data and the creation of our research products, as the findings depicted here are interpreted and represented based on our own academic insight. The data represented here have been filtered multiple times, and in multiple ways, through our own scholarly lens—a fact which should be considered when engaging with this study. Though we have tried to empathize with the experiences described here as best we can, and to depict stories in an authentic manner, our analysis cannot relate the unmediated voices of our student participants.
Our current interest in students’ experience and agency has taken years to develop. Research regarding Freeform has slowly shifted from early efforts centered on program development and evaluation to a more nuanced, intentional, and empathetic engagement with student experience. As tenure-track faculty (all PUWL faculty members were tenured at the time of writing), researchers, and former undergraduate students ourselves, we are each invested in the effort to better understand and improve the learning experiences of engineering undergraduates. However, due to our positions as paid researchers at a research-intensive university, we necessarily inhabit a position of privilege and perceived authority in our interactions with student (and perhaps faculty) participants. In addition, most of our team identifies as white or as men, labels which bear their own inherent privilege. The ramifications of this privilege and perceived power naturally extend to the collection of data and the creation of our research products, as the findings depicted here are interpreted and represented based on our own academic insight. The data represented here have been filtered multiple times, and in multiple ways, through our own scholarly lens—a fact which should be considered when engaging with this study. Though we have tried to empathize with the experiences described here as best we can, and to depict stories in an authentic manner, our analysis cannot relate the unmediated voices of our student participants.
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