Where Wild Rats Roam: A Case Study on Students' Participation in Urban Citizen Science Project

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 20
  In Roundtable Session: Educational Research After the "Animal Turn": Speculative and World-Making Multispecies Encounters

Abstract

Public participation in science has seen a renewed interest through a concept called citizen science (Miller-Rushing, Primack, & Bonney, 2012; Silvertown, 2009). Optimally, citizen science projects benefit from the participants’ local knowledge, and in two-way knowledge creation, participation could provide tools and information for citizens for empowered understanding of the world. It has been suggested that participation in citizen science increases positive attitudes towards science (Bonney, Phillips, Ballard, & Enck, 2016; Phillips, Porticella, Constas, & Bonney, 2018) and, specifically, studying own near-environment can nurture positive attitudes toward environment and study species (Ballard, Dixon, & Harris, 2017). Citizen science can also be combined to formal education, although there is lack of evidence on how students learn and how their attitudes are shaped during citizen science projects.

We present a case study on the Helsinki Urban Rat Project investigating how secondary school students perceive learning about and with urban rats. Students set track plates in different locales in Helsinki, photographed and identified rat tracks for four days and submitted their data with mobile application. We visited classrooms before students participated in the project and gave a presentation on rats and research protocol. Students were free to choose places for track plates, though they were encouraged to set them in familiar environments, and students were asked to “think like a rat” when setting plates to set plates in potential rat paths. We interviewed students in groups after participation and performed theory-guiding content analysis on the transcribed interviews.

Experientiality, participation, autonomy, personal and societal significance and interest towards rats increased interest in participation, while lack of rewards and significance were described as decreasing interest. Students suggested acquiring factual knowledge on rats, conceptual knowledge on urban ecosystems, procedural knowledge on rat population estimation and metacognitive knowledge on planning research. Students’ attitudes towards rats were predominantly negative, though many mentioned that their attitudes changed to more positive. Main contributors to negative attitudes (classified along Kellert, 1984) were rat activities and habitus, cultural perceptions and personal negative experiences. Indeed, students had talked about rats transmitting plague in history class and this created negative attitudes.

Our results show that authenticity and autonomous participation drive perceived interest in citizen science project. Students described profound learning experiences, such as methodological critiques and suggestions to improve their own work, suggesting that citizen science can be valuable in formal education. Nevertheless, when students who had detected rats in their own near-environment were asked how they reacted to that knowledge, the students did not describe any actions, nor suggested any consequences of this increased knowledge. This suggests that while students find it interesting to know whether there are rats in their near-environment, this knowledge creation does not have further consequences in relation to human-rat relationship. Thus, even though students encounter authentic rat tracks and know for sure where rats have moved, this knowledge as such does not create deeper relation between students and more-than-human cohabitants of urban spaces. This observation suggests a need to find new ways of creating knowledge on interspecies relations in urban environments.

Authors

• Tuomas Aivelo, University of Helsinki

• Suvi Huovelin, Heureka - Helsinki