Building a regional network of school-based citizen scientists for sustainable energy futures

• In Event: Education for Planetary Futures (Part 2): Disrupting, Reimagining, and Co-Designing Pedagogies on the Edge

Proposal

As a tool to educate for sustainable planetary futures, school-based citizen science (CitSci) invites students to take up positioning as rightful co-contributors to new knowledge and practices pertaining to socio-technical solutions addressing climate change challenges. CitSci can increase students’ interest in and knowledge of environmental awareness and sustainable stewardship (Ballard et al., 2017; Buchanan, 2019, Jenkins, 2011). However, CitSci projects often narrowly frame student participation as teachers struggle to foster agency within the constraints of school structures (Benichou et al., 2023; Klusch et al., 2020). Moreover, participation can leave students disconnected from local communities and natural ecosystems unless they are intentionally connected through community ethnography (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2021), place-based pedagogies, and purposes that imbue students’ agentive actions as real work with real consequences (Authors, 2021; Authors, 2024).

This study investigates how K-12 teachers, students, and facilitators co-created a regional network of citizen scientists focused on sustainable energy futures. The context was a CitSci program focused on student agency for collecting, analyzing and sharing regional data from solar energy enhanced gardens across a desert region in the southwestern US. Agrivoltaics is research whereby solar panels placed over agricultural crops protect plants from heat and light, decrease water evaporation, and generate renewable energy. In the current project, each school campus hosted a small agrivoltaics demonstration site with one experimental bed with solar panels, and one control bed.

This design-based research project drew on theoretical frameworks of expansive framing. Expansive framing makes students’ CitSci work visible (recognize ways their data is seen by end-users), believable (perceive how their data is used by scientists and community members) and meaningful (solve problems they deem as important in their environment) (Harris et al., 2020). Teachers can expansively frame student contributions to CitSci efforts (Benichou et al., 2023) by transforming learning goals, student agentive roles, and community connections.
Combining qualitative techniques from social network analysis, we characterize and graphically represent the interconnected networks of support cultivated by teachers to connect students with communities and organizations beyond the classroom walls. Data included interviews and artifacts collected from 17 K-12 STEM teachers leading school-based agrivoltaics demonstration sites following participation in a five-week summer professional development.

Findings highlight that teachers generated differentiated networks of collaboration that expansively framed students’ contributions to agrivoltaics. Some teachers created networks that leveraged social media tools to connect their students with agrivoltaic citizen scientists at other schools. Others sought to enhance the expansive framing of students’ sustainability efforts through community ethnography. Still others created expansive networks connecting students to diverse sources of knowledge including Indigenous regional agricultural practices, cooking with local crops, composting, and installing solar energy systems, among others. The most extensive networks built on teachers’ existing personal and professional networks, creating new linkages that connected them to CitSci.

The results of this study can inform school-based CitSci models and teacher PD programs designed to help teachers facilitate student agency and connectivity. Structures that foster and nurture networks of support may be particularly critical to re-imagining CitSci for sustainable planetary futures.

Authors

• Michelle E Jordan, Arizona State University

• Rebekah Jongewaard, Arizona State University

• Carlos Meza-Torres

• Steven Zuiker, Arizona State University

• Emmanuel Adeloju, Arizona State University