Developing inclusive informal science education practice: Useful concepts from research

How can we understand what inclusive informal science education might look like in practice? This research brief provides a short overview of what we do know about inclusive informal science learning from research and covers some of the limitations of that research. Starting with some key issues to consider in terms of informal learning research, this paper outlines some practical points, and briefly reviews the relatively small amount of research that is specifically about inclusive informal science learning. The focus of this paper is on conceptual inclusion and a few, specific social positions, notably gender, ethnicity and, to a lesser extent, social class. What this means is that I have not included research about physical inclusion, for example, research on the needs of visually impaired people or British Sign Language users.