Community of practice approach for understanding identity development within informal physics programs

Studies on physics identity have shown that it is one of the main factors that can predict a person’s persistence in the field; therefore, studying physics identity is critical to increase diversity within the field of physics and to understand what changes can allow more women and minorities to identify with the field. In this study, we investigate informal physics programs as spaces for physics identity exploration. These programs provide unique conditions under which to study physics identity development along with other identities. Informal physics spaces allow for voluntary engagement, as well as elements of agency and autonomy within the exploration of physics. Thus, these spaces allow an identity to form outside of the constraints traditionally found in academic settings. In this work, we operationalized the community of practice framework to study the development of physics identities within university students who facilitate informal physics programs. We present the stories from two physics graduate students out of our sample to provide a context for testing the feasibility of the extended framework and to identify how experiences within an informal physics program can shape physics identity development. This paper presents the operationalized constructs within the community of practice framework, how these constructs are applied to the narrated experiences of our participants and highlights how we can use this framework to understand the nuances of physics identity development as well as the factors that can influence that development.

Figure 1

Depiction of three main layers of our operationalized CoP framework. The first layer consists of the community dimensions, the second layer consists of the mechanisms of identity, and the third layer consists of the interests (or communities) that the interviewees were referring to during the identified segment of the interview. Each segment of the interview labeled with either a construct of layer 1 or 2 will also have a subcode indicating the level of membership currently experienced by the interviewee or the direction of movement within the levels of membership.

Figure 2

Percentage of overlap between PCA and other communities (out of total percentage of overlapping areas for PCA) for Cecilia (left) and Mike (right).

Figure 3

Community dimensions within PCA represented as a percentage of all community membership codes for both Mike and Cecilia. The codes have been separated into the subcode categories—insider (dots), inbound (circles), neutral, outbound (diagonal), and peripheral (closely spaced diagonal)—to show the percentage of codes that were coded as movement or community membership levels. Mutuality of engagement did not produce any peripheral or insider codes and negotiation of the repertoire did not produce any outbound or peripheral codes.

Figure 4

Identity mechanisms for PCS shown as a percentage of all identity mechanism codes for both Mike and Cecilia. The codes have been separated into the subcode categories—inbound (circle), neutral, and outbound (diagonal lines)—to show movement between membership levels. Negotiated experiences (NE) was the only category with outbound codes.

Figure 5

The community of practice framework as it was structured to study university students’ physics identity development in informal physics programs. In this structure, the mechanisms of identity act on the community dimensions, prompting changes in students’ levels of membership within the community of practice and therefore their identity.

Figure 6

Example of coded segments from interviews. The top example shows that the text was coded as negotiation of the repertoire [(NR) community dimension code] and nexus of multimembership [(NM) mechanism of identity code] for both the physics and PCA communities. The bottom example shows the first sentence coded as mutuality of engagement (community dimension code) and the last sentences as accountability to the enterprise (community dimension code). The entire segment was coded as negotiated experiences (mechanism of identity code) for both the physics and PCA communities