Welcome to the Professional Development Working Group

The goal of the professional development working group is to facilitate the development of effective professional development services for citizen science practitioners, researchers, educators, and others involved in the field.

The Working Group seeks to help develop of effective professional development services for practitioners by

1. Facilitating the development of meaningful professional development curricula.
2. Working with working groups and other organizations to deliver effective citizen science professional development courses and experiences.
3. Facilitating communication among those developing professional development curricula and courses to maximize compatibility, standardization, and synergy to the degree possible.
4. Helping 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 a field as diverse (in goals, scale and scope in any dimension—geography, data needs, education outcomes, etc. etc.) will be quite challenging.  The professional development working group looks forward to discovering, creating and sharing suites of materials or policies or standards that speak to this diversity—whether we are talking about a Lakes Monitoring Initiative or an international social justice effort.  

The Professional Development Working Group will benefit from the diverse group of practitioners and members from the CSA to collectively balance universality in training needs with idiosyncrasies.