DBER attracts many faculty from other STEM disciplines, and these faculty have little or no specific training in DBER. DBER requires a mastery of quantitative, qualitative, and/or mixed methodologies, and also a nuanced understanding of breadth of topic, research questions, and theoretical frameworks. This interdisciplinarity is particularly challenging for emerging DBER researchers who often switch into DBER with only discipline specific content and research training. As part of a large study about how STEM faculty become involved with DBER, we interviewed a number of emerging DBER faculty about their pathways into DBER. We conducted a thematic analysis of these interviews grounded in the theoretical frameworks of the reasoned action approach and conjecture mapping. Based on our analysis we identified 3 roles that support new faculty entering DBER. These roles are the peer, the subject matter expert, and the project manager.

Physics mentors play an important role in supporting students in postsecondary education and in their transition to graduate school and careers. The knowledge and beliefs physics mentors have about disability can affect how they mentor students with disabilities. We administered the Disability and Physics Careers Survey (DPCS) to 237 practicing physicists recruited through physics-specific listservs to measure their knowledge about disability and beliefs about the viability of physics careers for people with different disability diagnoses. This study compares practicing physicists' varied knowledge about different categories of impairments and diagnoses, and their beliefs about the viability of future careers for students with specific impairments. We present our findings examining the knowledge of practicing physicists about disability, their beliefs about the viability of certain physics careers for people with disabilities, and how those beliefs may vary depending on their personal disability experience.

Disability is an often-overlooked aspect of diversity. Recent research has indicated that there are barriers to access and participation for disabled students inherent in the design of physics courses. To help counteract these barriers, universities are required to provide reasonable accommodations for disabled students. However, not all students use the accommodations they have access to because of social factors (e.g., disability stigma), and others do not have access to the professional diagnosis often required to access accommodations. The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of students who identify with a disability/impairment who were taking an emergency remote teaching (ERT) physics course in Fall 2020 to inform policies about providing access to students in future remote and face-to-face courses. In this paper, we present the prevalence and types of impairments disabled students in physics courses reported, their reported accommodation usage, and ethical considerations of this work. Overall, we find that disabled students represent a sizeable group in physics courses, and there are positive and negative reasons students did not use or request accommodations.

Due to the growing concerns surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, colleges and universities either canceled or remotely hosted their 2020 National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) programs. This analysis is part of a larger study examining the impact of these fully remote experiences on professional and psychosocial factors such as mentees' sense of belonging, identity, and self-efficacy and their retention in STEM degree programs. We present a single-student case study and describe the dramaturgical analysis which centers on identifying five fundamental constructs within the data: objectives, conflicts, tactics, attitudes, and emotions. These items investigate what the participant in the remote REU program experienced and how this experience changed the ways in which he thinks about his future career decision making. Our analysis explored four different sub-narratives: lack of community in virtual REU, mentor support, perception of the real nature of the experience in a virtual format, and future career decision-making. The mentee reported that this experience was highly beneficial and that he developed a sense of belonging and identity, despite working remotely - often from his own bedroom.

The ways in which physics majors make career decisions is a critical, yet understudied, aspect of the undergraduate experience. Such decisions are important to students, physics departments, and administrators. In this project, we specifically examine how students develop interests and intent to pursue specific subfields of physics by interviewing 13 physics majors from all years of study. The interviews examined factors that led students to choose their most preferred and least preferred subfields. Interviews leveraged the framework of Social Cognitive Career Theory, a model that describes how several constructs such as self-efficacy, learning experiences, and outcome expectations relate to decision-making Findings highlight the differences in decision-making between upper-division students and beginning students. For instance, we see how popular culture and popular science provide an initial learning experience about certain subfields, such as astronomy and astrophysics, which strongly affect beginning students' perceptions of that subfield. Initial exposure to biology and chemistry in high school or early undergraduate classes often negatively affected students' interests in fields like biophysics or chemical physics. Data also suggests a splitting between students with respect to their outcome expectations of a desirable career in science. While some students prioritize using science to help people, others prioritize discovery of new knowledge through science, and some are in between. Students in both groups form perceptions about subfields that do not align with their identities and hence make decisions based on these perceptions. For instance, a student who prioritizes helping others through science may be quick to reject astrophysics as a subfield choice as they do not think that astrophysics can help people enough.

We draw on methods from lines-of-argument analysis in Critical Interpretive Synthesis to synthesize and critique pathways through which disabled students access supports in postsecondary STEM. Integrating recent literature about pathways to access in postsecondary education as well as our ongoing research, we describe various mechanisms through which disabled students are currently provided (or not provided) access in postsecondary STEM and identify strengths and weaknesses with these various pathways. Specifically, we describe and problematize the typical accommodations process, which requires students to register with a Disability Resource Center which then negotiates accommodations with the disabled student and their instructors. Next, we describe alternatives to the traditional accommodations model, such as normalizing discussion of access needs (a tenant of disability justice), allowing individual instructors to validate students' needs and appropriate accommodations, and access through interdependence (another tenant of disability justice). We describe dimensions along which these pathways vary, such as process, disclosure, requirements for validity, and burden. We suggest instructors and mentors pull from all these models to create a transparent ecosystem of supports.

To improve accessibility and inclusion in postsecondary STEM education, we propose implementing Universal Design for Learning (UDL) based practices to meet the needs of a variety of learners. The UDL is a design framework aimed at improving and optimizing teaching and learning for all people, regardless of their disability status. As part of a larger professional development project, interviews were conducted with members of a faculty learning community to discuss their instructional practices and to offer feedback regarding opportunities to remove barriers to access and participation. In this paper, we focus on an interview with a physics instructor and examine their beliefs about students with disabilities as evidenced by the disability-specific language used in the interview. This prompted a new perspective on professional development regarding accommodating students with disabilities that focuses on confronting ablest beliefs as a crucial component in promoting inclusion in STEM education.

Students' use of support from peers and instructors is an important aspect of success in college. This preliminary phenomenographic study examines a variety of help seeking behaviors of undergraduate majors in physics and life sciences and factors that lead to those behaviors. Seven students described their experiences using semistructured interviews during the summer of 2021. The analysis was structured around identifying characteristics of peers and instructors, as well as personal help-seeking attitudes, that either promoted help seeking or help avoidance. Peers were generally the first source of help, and were prioritized based on ability and the closeness of the relationship. Instructors fostered help seeking through availability and a non-judgemental demeanor. A feeling of vulnerability and fear of judgement was cited as the most common reason for avoiding help. The findings provide insights for faculty and departments seeking to encourage student success.

In this paper, we present a case study with a disabled physics student to draw attention to his experiences in the physics community, and the barriers and supports that he experienced as he advanced through his physics career. Using a methodology of narrative analysis, we identify themes and genres within the stories told by the participant. Narratives are often created to explain the unexpected and to solve a problem. In the physics community, disabled students find their differences (i.e., disability/impairments) are often positioned as unexpected and a problem to be solved. We use narrative analysis to humanize disabled physics students and to highlight their lived experiences of progressing through the physics community over their perceived deviation from the physics norm. From this, we create resources for physics mentors to increase their knowledge of disabled physics students' experiences and how to support accessibility and inclusion in the physics community.

Queer theory in STEM education research is often used as a synonym for studying LGBT+ students or queer issues. However, queer theory and queer methods can be applied to discipline-based education research far more broadly. In this paper I introduce a unique perspective on queering quantitative and qualitative research methods and highlight some of the ways these methods are already compatible with the goals of physics education research. This will include discussions of deconstructing binaries, empowering participants in the research process, and reimagining study design to attain novel insights about the experiences of physicists.