Engaging local expertise in community science

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Community-Centered and Relational Approaches in Environmental Science and Engineering Education

Abstract

Objectives

Community science projects often engage local publics and professional scientists in joint processes of scientific inquiry, and as such, provide a forum for interaction and engagement wherein these groups co-construct shared knowledge relevant to environmental-problem solving (Jadallah and Ballard, 2025). Focusing on episodes of coordination work across stakeholders, this paper investigates the design features of community science that afford or constrain opportunities for multiple forms of expertise – namely lay participants’ historically-accumulated local ecological knowledge – to inform broader goals of socio-ecological transformation.

Theoretical Perspectives

To examine the processes through which community science engages multiple ways of knowing, we draw on the idea of community science literacy, a form of science literacy defined as a social practice through which the knowledge held by many individuals comes together through relationships (Busch and Rajwade, 2024). From this perspective, science literacy is understood not as a characteristic of individual learners, but a collective endeavor emerging from interaction (Roth and Lee, 2002). This perspective builds from sociocultural theories that highlight learning as a distributed endeavor occurring not only “in the mind,” but as a function of the relationships between humans, tools, artifacts, and the natural world (Nasir and Hand, 2008; Vossoughi et al., 2023).

Methods

We draw on ethnographic data collected over multiple years of a community science initiative assessing watershed health in the Mountain West. Primary data sources included participant observations of field-based scientific monitoring activities and interviews with project facilitators, collaborating scientists, and youth and adult volunteers. After first identifying and then focusing on episodes of coordination work – defined as when two or more people worked together to complete tasks or solve problems – we engaged a grounded theory approach to data analysis that relied on open and axial coding (Glaser and Straus, 1967).

Results

We found that participants in community-based science indeed brought diverse repertoires of knowledge, skills, and related expertise to the project that was essential to advancing the collective work of scientific inquiry. Logan, for example, was a high school student who grew up hunting in the watershed. He leveraged his intimacy with the physical contours of the riparian corridor to aid the facilitators and other youth in navigating its channel to document fish and beaver habitat. Several design features mediated opportunities for participants like Logan to leverage their expertise toward the co-construction of scientific knowledge, including: (1) the ability of individuals to shift between project roles, (2) boundary spanners’ work to broker knowledge across groups, and (3) epistemic hierarchies latent in the dominance of normative science structured if, when, and how participants’ lay knowledge would be engaged.

Significance

Ultimately, we suggest that honoring and uplifting local knowledge – by designing for epistemic heterogeneity – is necessary not only to create opportunities for individuals to engage in science learning, but for community science to harness multiple forms of expertise in endeavoring toward socio-ecological well-being. Our findings problematize dominant assumptions about scientific expertise that gloss over the broader expertise distributed within communities, and point to design principles that support epistemic heterogeneity in community science.

Authors

• Christopher Jadallah, University of California - Los Angeles

• Heidi Ballard, University of California - Davis