About
A history of Professional Pathways
Professional Pathways in Informal STEM Learning (ISL) is designed for anyone who works in ISL. Whether you’re just starting out or advancing your career, the Pathways suite of tools—including the Framework, Self-Assessment, and Learning Plan—can help you understand, plan, and advance your skills, knowledge, and capabilities.
Developing Pathways
Pathways began as a conversation among several long-time ISL professionals about ways to validate and advance the skills of those working in ISL. When they came across the idea of competency frameworks, they were intrigued. Competency frameworks describe what individuals need to be able to do in a particular area of work (i.e., competencies) and the specific skills and knowledge that are part of those competencies. By clearly articulating what those competencies are and what they look like, competency frameworks can help people understand, support, develop, and align professional learning efforts to meet their goals, whether they are short- or long-term.
They brought the idea to ASTC, and then the collaboration grew to include Oregon State University’s STEM Research Center and COSI’s Center for Research & Evaluation (CRE). After additional planning and discussion, the project received National Science Foundation support. The initial team believed that a framework like this could help ISL professionals identify the skills and knowledge they wanted to develop based on their personal and professional goals, and then they could decide how to meet those goals based on their own unique circumstances and learning preferences.
To better understand the needs of the ISL field, the team launched a series of workshops to learn from ISL professionals about their responsibilities and the skills and knowledge they needed to do their jobs. Workshops took place in different parts of the U.S. with participants representing a range of career levels and small, medium, and large science centers and museums. A national survey and targeted interviews with ISL professionals and organizations verified workshop results. A review of current literature about professional learning and the use of competency frameworks alongside feedback from the field further informed and refined the framework. Following a long, iterative process of analyzing, categorizing, and soliciting feedback, the team began to see a distinction between competencies that related to a person’s specific position, and those that were more general, as well as those that were internal versus external.
From these findings, the team built a preliminary framework around four domains of competencies. Learn more about the four domains of competencies, which were carried into the current Framework. Feedback about the initial framework was gathered during testing with a wide range of ISL professionals, and—in response to priorities voiced during workshops and listening sessions—the team worked to revise the framework and build supporting tools. After significant input and review by professionals across the field, Pathways was created.
This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Award No. 2215274. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF.