By Mark Chandler and Hannah Webber, and the Professional Development Working Group
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The CSA board recently approved a Professional Development working group. Despite the term “professional,” this group aims to serve practitioners (paid or unpaid) working to support the design, implementation, and/or use of citizen science. The goals of this group are to:

• Facilitate the development of meaningful, project-neutral professional development curricula.
• Collaborate with working groups and other organizations to deliver effective courses and learning experiences.
• Facilitate communication among those developing curricula and courses to maximize compatibility, standardization, and synergy to the degree possible.
• Help communicate the suite of professional development services that are available to citizen science practitioners, researchers, educators, and others involved in the field.

Practitioner development for this diverse field will be quite challenging. The working group looks forward to discovering, creating and sharing suites of materials, policies, and standards that speak to this diversity—whether we are talking about a one-site Lakes Monitoring Initiative or an international social justice effort. The working group will benefit from the diversity of practitioners on the working group and members of the CSA, to collectively balance universality in training needs with idiosyncrasies.
For more information, contact Mark Chandler, mchandler@earthwatch.org and Hannah Webber, hwebber@schoodicinstitute.org.

Posted on: December 22, 2015  |  Category: Blog, Professional Development Working Group