Personas for supporting physicists' engagement in informal education

Abstract

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.

A Professional Development Program for Emerging STEM Education Researchers

“…Receiving introductory information on how to design an education project, building mechanisms to sustain research projects and engaging with a supportive community helped participants increase their agency in STEM education research [17]. In our work investigating how emerging STEM education researchers identify and/or imagine their positioning in DBER, we identified how emerging STEM education researchers conceptualize their navigation into education research [18]. We identified three ways they conceptualize education research: to improve teaching, to join a new field of research, or negotiate their position and identity in DBER vis-à-vis their home discipline.…”

“…Our research also highlights how important it is to attend explicitly to the needs of each participant. In particular, as STEM faculty become education researchers, they are not only navigating a new research field, they are also trying to see how to fit it within the local needs of their department and institution [18]. Thus, attending explicitly to each participant's institution type, department priorities, and career stage is important to help them be successful in their research endeavors.…”