Informal Education Is Essential to Physics

This document, "Informal Education Is Essential to Physics: Recommendations for departments & institutions 2025," by the JNIPER Community, outlines a goal to shift the culture so that Informal Physics Education (IPE) is widely recognized as an essential physics practice. It proposes three main levers to achieve this:

• Lever 1: Structures This lever focuses on amplifying structures that recognize IPE as an essential activity worthy of resource allocation. Recommendations include leveraging the connection between IPE and service learning (S.2), integrating IPE with existing efforts to broaden participation (S.3), including and rewarding IPE work in hiring and promotion policies (S.4), allowing IPE activities to fulfill service requirements (S.5), providing funding for IPE work at multiple scales (S.6), establishing recognition mechanisms for exemplary IPE programs and practitioners (S.7), creating or expanding community engagement/campus extension offices (S.8), and obtaining the Community Engagement Elective Carnegie Classification for the institution (S.9).
• Lever 2: Engagement of interested, influential, and impacted parties This lever aims to identify techniques for recruiting and empowering people to engage in and/or support IPE. Recommendations include investing in infrastructure that supports public engagement and evaluation (P.8), recognizing IPE activities in tenure and promotion processes (P.9), integrating IPE activities into the curriculum and providing academic credit (P.10), meeting with policymakers to advocate for supportive policies and funding (P.3), inviting policymakers and leaders to interact with IPE programs (P.4), acknowledging IPE career pathways (P.11), and obtaining the Community Engagement Elective Carnegie Classification (P.12).
• Lever 3: Integrating Research-Based Practices in IPE This lever focuses on leveraging research to understand, develop, and advocate for IPE. Recommendations include hiring faculty who research IPE (R.10), incorporating IPE evaluation and research into the curriculum (R.11), supporting graduate study of IPE (R.12), staffing IRB offices with experts in community-based research (R.13), and establishing recognition mechanisms for exemplary IPE programs and practitioners, particularly those that incorporate research-based practices (R.14).