Building Capacity for Workforce Retention in Outdoor and Environmental Science Education

This is a collaborative project among a research and learning design team at a large public university, a community-based organization, and a data and strategic consultancy firm. The project aims to develop a scalable model that can advance the organizational capacity of Outdoor and Environmental Science Education (OESE) to cultivate work environments that promote the retention of STEM educators, thereby building up organizational capacity to implement high-quality STEM learning in the outdoors. The project will support a team of leaders from five organizations to facilitate and guide organization-wide discussions related to organizational structure, policies, and practices to identify strategies that can strengthen a robust workforce and high-quality, innovative STEM learning opportunities. The project includes collaborative and interconnected research and evaluation components to inform project activities, provide resources, assess the effectiveness of the capacity-building model, and examine how organizational changes can effectuate change that supports the retention of its staff and organizational capacity to implement high-quality STEM learning outdoors. The research components of the project will explore three questions using a qualitative, case study approach: (RQ1) What are the conditions necessary in OESE organizations that promote the retention of staff and high-quality STEM learning experiences? (RQ2) What are the indicators of meaningful organizational change? and (RQ3) How do staff make meaning of their experiences in the field-at-large, and what factors shape the long-term retention of staff in the environmental learning field? Drawing on the Six Conditions of Systems Change (Kania et al., 2018), research findings will build on theoretical and practical understandings of how organizational structures, policies, and practices can promote a robust workforce that represents its communities and promotes high-quality STEM learning in the outdoors. The evaluation will utilize a mixed-methods design to explore the key design and implementation features that can employ important levers or address barriers such that participants are positioned to authentically engage in organizational transformation. Collectively, the research and evaluation will lead to new understandings of how to conceptualize, enact, and assess organizational change in OESE organizations, which can offer important insights to STEM education more broadly. By bridging research and evaluation, the project team will be able to test the model, exploring the interplay between the social, institutional, and individual factors and organizational conditions to identify key indicators of organizational change. All programmatic and research activities included in this project are open to anyone. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.