DBER attracts many faculty from other STEM disciplines, and these faculty have little or no specific training in DBER. DBER requires a mastery of quantitative, qualitative, and/or mixed methodologies, and also a nuanced understanding of breadth of topic, research questions, and theoretical frameworks. This interdisciplinarity is particularly challenging for emerging DBER researchers who often switch into DBER with only discipline specific content and research training. As part of a large study about how STEM faculty become involved with DBER, we interviewed a number of emerging DBER faculty about their pathways into DBER. We conducted a thematic analysis of these interviews grounded in the theoretical frameworks of the reasoned action approach and conjecture mapping. Based on our analysis we identified 3 roles that support new faculty entering DBER. These roles are the peer, the subject matter expert, and the project manager.
The pathways and engagement of physicists in informal physics education are varied, which makes their professional development needs not well understood. As part of ongoing efforts to build and support community in the informal physics space, we conducted interviews with physics practitioners and researchers with a range of different experiences. Through thematic analysis, we use personas methodology to articulate the needs and pain points of professional physicists. We present our set of four personas: the physicist who engages in informal physics for self-reflection, the physicist who wants to spark interest in physics, the physicist who wants to provide diverse role models to younger students and inspire them to pursue a STEM career, and the physicist who wants to improve the relationship between scientists and the public. This work will allow the informal physics community to create tailored resources for the variety of professional development needs of informal physics facilitators.
This paper investigates the interactions between context and professional development of physics instructors in a case study of two physics faculty. A phenomenological-case study approach was used to analyze two physics faculty at different institutions over a year and a half using three semistructured interviews each. The data enabled the identification of relevant context elements; and the impact of these elements on physics faculty's professional development was explored by adapting Bell and Gilbert's framework for teacher development [1]. The analysis shows that both case study subjects used their physics expertise and growing understanding of their context to develop their physics teaching. However, this process of development was enacted differently given the nature of their context, highlighting instructors' strengths in navigating their local context to improve their physics teaching. The results show the subtleties of how context has a salient, complex, and evolving role in moderating faculty's professional development. By taking a faculty-centric approach, this paper broadens the community's awareness of the ways physics instructors develop their physics teaching. This work contributes to a relatively new lens by which the physics community views, discusses, and supports the professional development of physics faculty.
This report is a summary of the mini-conference on Workforce Development Through Research-Based, Plasma-Focused Science Education and Public Engagement held during the 2022 American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics annual meeting. The motivation for organizing this mini-conference originates from recent studies and community-based reports highlighting important issues with the current state of the plasma workforce. Here, we summarize the main findings presented in the two speaker sessions of the mini-conference, the challenges, and recommendations identified in the discussion sessions and the results from a post-conference survey. We further provide information on initiatives and studies presented at the mini-conference, along with references to further resources.
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