Community-Based Climate Education: Mapping Co-Design Using Expanded Notions of Local Landscape Data (Poster 36)

• In Event: AERA Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

"The growth of data-focused technologies like Artificial Intelligence intensifies the need to clearly define how data should operate in society. My community-based scholarship explores technology that visualizes local data to engage a primary question in data science education: who gets to define, hold, and produce valuable data? Using the practices and perspectives of critical data science, I investigate the technical and socio-technical role of personally held landscape data, exploring how this data might contribute to equitable and just decision-making around complex problems like climate change.

Using an asset-based approach grounded in design thinking, I supported members of a rural, conservative-leaning, climate-vulnerable community to collaboratively map the history, culture, and more-than-human nature of their environment. My qualitative analysis of design sessions and artifacts answers: (1) How might producing an online, map-based community resource support visualizing and expanding participants' notions of personally held data? and (2) What are participants’ perspectives, values, and practices around including their map within the community’s existing shared evidence base for civic decision-making? My analysis shows that collectively building a community map supports collecting and articulating personally held data, including data related to climate change. However, participants are challenged to expand their notions of valuable local data. I further find that the community map makes visible locally held data in ways that participants and local decision-makers find valuable. My future work will continue exploring the role of personally held and locally produced data in equitable and just community decision-making.
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Author

• Heather Killen, University at Buffalo - SUNY