Design(ing) Research as Professional Learning for Informal Science Educators

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: Collecting and Sharing Information: Libraries, Museums, Partnerships, and the Public

Abstract

This paper explores how practitioner professional learning became primary to a Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) in an informal science learning program, “Community Science for Social Justice.” Drawing primarily on interview and fieldnote data from the end of the project, it examines how this design-based RPP provided structures—temporal, communal, and linguistic—for informal science educators to iteratively reflect on their practice and, as a result, develop tools for professional learning for other informal educators. It argues that, given the need for high-quality, critical professional development for informal educators as well as calls to make research answerable to learning (Patel, 2016), RPPs need to explicitly center practitioner professional learning as a research objective and to utilize the research process for this goal.

Author

• Shannon McManimon, SUNY - College at New Paltz