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.

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.