Practice-and-Research (April 2013)
Beginning in 2012, CAISE embarked on a Practice and Research initiative, in response to increased interest in identifying the grand challenges of informal STEM education and in exploring the possibility of creating a research agenda for the field. The initiative involved a series of activities that began with conference calls and phone interviews with practitioners and researchers who were working on research agendas or research and practice partnerships. Themes and issues raised on these calls became the discussion threads of a subsequent week-long online forum, which surfaced additional challenges and opportunities for mutually informed practice and research. Further analysis of the content from the calls and forum informed the agendas for two in-person convenings. After the first convening in early 2013, this second convening was a smaller working group meeting at the University of Pittsburgh on April 19 and 20, 2013. The working group used categories raised at the first convening to develop a “roadmap” of areas in which research questions with relevance across ISE sectors could fit.
A total of over 250 researchers, practitioners and other stakeholders participated in Practice-and-Research activities in 2012 and 2013. Documentation and summaries from this effort can be downloaded at the top of this page and an archive of a blog post summarizing the January 31 and February 1, 2013 convening can be found here.
