Development of professional networks among environmental educators

ABSTRACT

Professional development programs provide an opportunity for environmental educators to develop networks to exchange ideas and practices in professional learning communities. This study investigated how diverse educators develop professional networks for exchanging information through online and face-to-face professional development activities. We conducted surveys and social network analysis of three professional learning communities including a state consortium with mostly face-to-face activities, an online-only learning community, and a fellowship program with both face-to-face activities and online interaction. We then used exponential random graph models to examine factors that influenced professional network formation in each community. The results showed that professional development activities including face-to-face meetings and Facebook interactions, and collaborative projects such as co-authoring book chapters, had positive effects on the likelihood of network formation. Results suggest that program leaders can facilitate discussions and collaborative projects to foster network formation in professional development programs, especially those conducted exclusively online.

KEYWORDS:

• Professional development
• learning communities
• online interaction
• professional networks
• network formation

Acknowledgments

We are most grateful to the participants of all three professional development programs in this study for sharing their program experiences with us. We also thank program leaders and facilitators including Judy Braus, Anne Ferguson, Jose “Pepe” Marcos-Iga and Alex Kudryavtsev for their support. Finally, we thank Matthew Brashears, Wang Liao, Skyler Seto, and David Sinclair for advice on social network analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The professional development programs described in this research were funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency through a cooperative agreement with the Cornell University (Assistant Agreement No. NT-83497401). This article has not been formally reviewed by EPA. The views expressed are solely those of the authors and EPA does not endorse any products or commercial services mentioned.