There and back again: an engineers (autoethnographic) tale

As a factory worker, who became a motor mechanic, an electronics technician, process engineer, university course director, associate dean and more recently a PhD student in education, I have an extremely varied experience of education and lifelong learning. As my research aim was to bring a different perspective to education, I also needed to take a different approach to research. So I began my PhD with a grounded theory style approach, and a reflexive autoethnography of my life of learning. An autoethnography exploring thirty years of my life was bound to uncover many themes, but one that stood out was my experience of a significant disconnect between engineering education and practice. This paper discusses the autoethnographic journey that concluded with me questioning how this disconnect is maintained. I conclude by briefly summarising how intend to explore this question in the latter stages of my PhD