Weaving Strands of Knowledge: Pursuing Equitable Community-Focused Science and Culture Podcasts in Bhutan, Vermont, and India

• In Event: Are We There Yet? Building and Exploring Equity in Research-Community Partnerships of Varied Scales and Durations

Abstract

Purposes and Frameworks: Because of the socio-scientific complexity of climate change, effective educational programs require collaboration among experts and community members that integrates scientific knowledge, cultural understanding, pedagogical expertise, and community engagement (Atran, Medin, & Ross, 2005; Bell et al., 2009; Pidgeon & Fischhoff, 2011). Our international and multi-institutional science education effort – the Weaving Strands of Knowledge (WSK) project – leveraged the flexibility of podcasting to bring together narratives/stories of environmental change. Partnership models like these, can, when equitably designed, challenge the top-down way in which much of western science both develops and disseminates scientific knowledge (Medin & Bang, 2014). Our project’s main challenge and primary contribution was to build equitable processes for science education and science knowledge creation in the short term – a ubiquitous constraint for equitable science in cross-cultural research and programming (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016). We critically examine the WSK project with a focus on opportunities and challenges to equitable partnership and culturally inclusive science education.

Modes of Inquiry, Sources of Evidence: The project involved a complex partnership between several universities, science museums, and non-governmental organizations. The project was developed over two years, adapting and transforming a podcasting design for climate change science education in rural Bhutan, rural Vermont, and both rural and urban communities in Goa, India. The project entailed reciprocal exchanges (e.g., partners in the US traveling abroad, and vice versus) and school- and community-based partnerships whose focus was recording stories from local community members about environmental change that they have observed. Students collected and edited the stories and then in some cases worked with museums to display multimedia exhibits.

Research on the WSK project is best described as a collective auto-ethnography. We chose to “study up” – critically repatriating the conventional anthropological gaze inward to examine of our own efforts to work equitably and collaboratively across partners and project team members (Gusterson, 1997). The project team aimed to describe and explore our collective process working with international partners in a design-based educational endeavor (Bell, 2004; Brown, 1992; Vakil et al., 2016). Main data sources include project artifacts, ethnographic fieldnotes, recordings of end-of-day debrief conversations where equity was an explicit topic of conversation, and exit interviews with photo elicitation prompts.

Results and Conclusions: Analyses focus on several domains, such as (1) evidence of the formative value and contribution of partnership-based equitable science. For example, one student majoring in marine science reflected “One of the most influential things that I learned – especially being a scientist, and a person who is always thinking scientifically – was from being surrounded by so many people that think in different ways. That was really valuable to me… I think this is going to make me a better scientist.”; (2) evidence of equity as a design attribute of international and cross-institutional science education programming; (3) evidence of epistemological alternatives to coloniality and formal science hierarchy in the efforts of the WSK project to develop new perspectives on climate science education that position the social and cultural in socio-scientific issue education as assets and epistemological strengths.

Authors

• Andrew D Coppens, University of New Hampshire

• Shakuntala Devi Gopal, University at Buffalo - SUNY