Central role of personnel in informal physics programming

Physicists, physics students, and community members come together and engage with physics content through various forms of informal education programming. Our prior work has shown that the landscape of informal physics programs in the United States has a variety of formats, audience demographics, and content. Informal physics programs have many benefits for both facilitators and community members; however, we do not fully understand how the variety of program structures, designs, and organizations affect participants’ experiences. In this study, we apply an organizational theory framework to study the connectedness of six functional aspects of informal physics programs: Assessment, Audience, Institution, Personnel, Program, and Resources. We interview lead facilitators about the design and structure of their programs. Here we present an in-depth qualitative analysis of three cases. We find that the personnel, consisting of the faculty, staff, and physics students facilitating the educational activities, have a prominent role in these programs. Our findings show how personnel members influence the physics content, activities, and interactions with the audience. We discuss how understanding these aspects can help support improving the functionality of informal physics programs in equitable and inclusive ways.

Figure 1

This chart represents the percentage of codes present for each framework category across all three case study programs. For example, for all codes in the Camp Physics interview, 3% of those were assessment, 17% were audience, etc. In comparison, for Physics Club, 2% of its codes were assessment, 7% were audience, etc. We found personnel to be the most prominent for all programs, accounting for roughly a third of all codes within each interview. Camp Physics, Physics Club, and Pub Physics had 286, 149, and 344 total codes, respectively.

Figure 2

These charts show overlaps between framework categories in our interviews. Each line connecting two framework categories means that there was at least one overlap between those categories for that program. The thickness of those lines is scaled by the percentage of overlaps coded in that particular interview between those two categories.

Figure 3

A visualization of how the framework categories connect with each other. Connections with the personnel are accompanied by generalized examples extracted from the interview data. As discussed, institution and resources were closely connected to each other and not as prominent, so they were combined for this visualization. Assessment is not explicitly included, however, we find that assessment arises when evaluating and observing one or more of these five categories, and those observations are often conducted by the personnel.