Unpacking Youth Environmental Decision Making for On-Campus Bird Conservation

• In Event: Childhood Contexts in Environmental Education

Abstract

Science education reform movements position students as people who do and use science. This paper investigates how 4th and 5th graders use their expertise and experiences in science to make habitat restoration decisions on their school campus. Students conducted a 9-month long bird-monitoring project in which they collected, evaluated, interpreted and made decisions with their bird monitoring data. Using ethnographic methods, this study follows 10 focal youth including the environmental issues they identified and the justifications they made for what action to take. Our findings demonstrate how values are inseparable from knowledge produced and decisions made, suggesting that students need opportunities to develop critical relationship to the knowledge they produce including how they use their knowledge to change their world.

Author

• Erin Bird, University of California - Davis