Centering Sense of Community in Professional Development for Emerging Discipline-Based Education Researchers

Traditional professional development (PD) often focuses solely on skills and knowledge, without explicitly attending to participants' sense of community. In this instrumental case study, we explore the impact of a community-building PD experience on an Emerging Discipline-Based Education Researcher's (EDBER's) sense of community. We center the experiences of one tenure-track faculty member, James (a pseudonym), who participated in a Professional Development for Emerging Education Researchers field school for EDBERs, an example of PD that intentionally attends to building community around research. We find that the PD experience contributed to building James' lasting of community in education research, and we call for more PD to shift towards being simultaneously skills-focused and community-focused.