Revitalizing Traditions Through Critical Community Science and Creative Placemaking

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

Abstract

Objective
Although citizen science and community science efforts can be powerful participatory approaches that generate much-needed local knowledge, increase scientific agency and identities, and even develop socio-ecological caring for a place, it is important to acknowledge that these forms of science have come under scrutiny in the last 15 years (Calabrese Barton, 2012; Fowler, 2023). One of these shortcomings is the extractive tendency to identify problems without a clear solution, or at best, gifting communities with solutions that don’t align with community ways of being. This approach fails to address the larger net of harms modernity casts, shying from the challenging work of critiquing and helping to heal long-standing cultural practices and traditions.

Theoretical Framework
Drawing together socio-cultural boundary theories of environmental education (Tzou & Bell, 2012) and ethical placemaking (Eicklenweiler, 2016), this study recognizes that community science unfolds through specific cultural ways of being and thinking, but often without creating space to consider how embedded community values, ideas, and practices support or contradict efforts to better care for a place and those in it.

Methods: Data Sources and Analysis
Using my field journals (Emerson et al., 2011) and other ethnographic data (i.e., photographs, interview recordings and transcripts, text messages) collected over the past four years of a community science effort (The Plastics Project), I identify two exemplary cases to feature (Madison, 2020). The cases each feature a story of how youth and community members of The Plastics Project came to recognize the abundance of plastic pollution created by themselves and the community during some long-standing community traditional celebration or ritual (e.g., El Bendición de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe and Día de los Muertos).

And, I show how through multigenerational creativity, the team responded to these tensions and cultivated place-making and deeper socio-ecological caring among themselves and others in town.

Results
Some themes that surfaced include:
Learning to identify tensions between their community science efforts and their community’s cultural traditions.
Grappling with hopelessness and feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of environmental degradation, and how to make change without losing self and community identity and cultural practices.
Intergenerational clean-up efforts and brainstorming efforts find ways to shift aspects of the tradition to leave a smaller ecological footprint.
This move from modernity (Machado de Oliveira, 2021), helps to revitalize community culture, place-making, and deepen socio-ecological caring.

Significance
This research provides real-world examples of how community science efforts can revitalize place-based traditions, as well as engage intergenerational groups in creative placemaking. Additionally, the web of theoretical and pedagogical orientations spun by this work offers a multilogic approach (Higgins & Tolbert, 2018) that connects critical community science (Fowler, 2022) to more culturally and socio-ecological conscious ontologies and commitments of caring. To elevate these orientations, I suggest a reflexive approach, including questions for education researchers and leaders of community STEM projects to engage with that build toward unpacking the question: What must shift in your work, for community science to be equally about individual and collective futurity, and relating to a place and beings there across time?

Author

• Kelsie Fowler, University of Washington