Youth indeed have done outreach to local government officials. In fact, one group of youth met with two city council members at their school and were later invited to present their findings at a meeting that included all of the City Council members. Also, youth have created flyers that present their findings to local residents, which have been distributed to local residents via a door-to-door leafleting campaign. 

Proud of you pops

Thank you, Eusi.  And thank you and Mathi for inspiring me. 

Hi Kwame, thank you for your message. In the past we have provided a summer program for youth who participated during the school year and wanted to continue. We have more recently provided different versions of the program—for instance a program designed for younger youth (middle school), and an internship format as an after school program. We are also currently preparing to implement the program in two new locations in different parts of the country to understand adaptations that help the program to be successful in new communities. As part of that work the EBAYS programming team is developing an instructor training that will hopefully lead to more educators being able to implement EBAYS in the future, and more students engaging with the program.

We are interested in any thoughts you or others may have on training educators in communities beyond your own in this type of place-based social justice learning. 

Warm regards,

Sarah

Hi Billy, thanks for those interesting discussion points. I will defer to my colleagues for more specifics around the scaffolding, but I can speak to some of what we have found on the research side of things, as we've had a lot of interesting findings from our interview data with 26 youth participants. Related to civic engagement, important program elements include:

• Participatory science on locally relevant environmental science content. When participants engage in collecting data in their own communities, analyze their data, and make sense of their data, they develop an increased awareness of environmental issues facing their communities, increased confidence in their ability to do science, and increased value of science and its role in their own families and community contexts.
• Explicit connections to social justice and avenues for action. Participants engage in conversations and activities around the impacts of environmental contamination on health and explore how locations and people of various demographics are impacted by pollution to varying degrees, and are presented with opportunities to take action by sharing findings with community members via end-of-unit presentations. In interviews, youth identified actions they could take to contribute to change that included 1) individual actions such as taking public transportation or engaging in community clean ups, 2) pro-social actions such as sharing findings with community members to spread awareness, and 3) broader-scale actions such as sharing their findings with people in political positions such as the mayor.

There is a lot more to say here, but I think something interesting that came up was that students varied in their perceptions of their ability to use science to make a difference and their evaluation of whether they can have an impact on a science-related social issue. This includes their perceived access to systems, people, and resources, as well as their perceptions of the manageability of the problem. While some youth identified solutions to environmental issues, others felt stymied by systematic barriers. While some youth envisioned a role for themselves, others did not. This is understandable given the complexity of the issues they are investigating, but has important implications for whether and how they choose to engage further. We are currently developing an interview protocol and a survey instrument to better understand youths’ environmental justice perspectives. Any thoughts or resources related to this would be much appreciated!

Thanks,

Sarah

Hi Emmanuel, thank you for checking out our video and your support of this project! We would love to hear more about your work and any connections you see. It's great to connect with the AERA community.

Hi Beatriz, in addition to Kevin's response below, I wanted to share that we recently had the opportunity to evaluate students' perceptions of the cultural-responsiveness of the program through the use of an equity pedagogy scale developed by Dr. Brandi Hinnat-Crawford and colleagues (citation below), which we are interested in continuing to attend to in our future research. 

Hinnnat-Crawford, B., Bergeron, L., Virtue, E., Cromartie, S., Harrington, S. Good teaching, warm and demanding classrooms, and critically conscious students: measuring student perceptions of asset-based equity pedagogy in the classroom. [Manuscript submitted for publication]. College of Education Allied Professions, Western Carolina University.

Hi Rebecca: Thank you for the link to your video. I agree that our work overlaps. We would certainly be able to enhance what we have program participants do with data by learning more about your work. 

Christina: Currently we do not have specific activities that provide students with information related to careers that feature advocacy-centered science. However, we do provide opportunities for students to interact with science practitioners who are engaged in justice-centered science, and we do include discussions that provide opportunities for students to learn about careers related to their particular research focus. 

Hello Christine,

Thank you for your question. Within this project, we began to understand how youth reflect on engaging their communities in their research. We operate with a broad understanding of activism that is inclusive of a range of activities from youth sharing their findings with family and school communities with the aim of raising awareness of environmental justice issues to engaging civic leaders, such as city councilpersons, in conversations about their findings and strategies for addressing the problem.

I also appreciate the thought of engaging with groups and individuals who identify as engaging in activism. As Kevin had mentioned the youth work with scientists who engage in activism work in the program but there is certainly potential to expand those networks.

Hi Brian,

Thanks for your question. We are continuing to work with youth and expand programming to a number of communities nationwide. As far as partnerships go, there is interest in the program from a range of communities and organizations and each of the partnerships is unique. This work could not happen without the engagement and support of partner organizations, youth, their guardians, and other members of the communities. 

Hi Nicole,

There are a number of ways youth join EBAYS. This project leveraged a partnership with a local school district to embed the program in formal science classrooms. There were also partnerships with after-school programs and other community organizations. Some youth returned to participate in additional EBAYS activities and shared their experiences with peers.

Russanne: Thank you for expressing interest in our work.

Actually, we present programming that includes community science research in a variety of ways that offer both free choice and non-free choice options. Free choice programming occurs as out-of-school weekend and/or summer “Internship” iterations. These programs occur over a 4 to 6-week period during which participants meet weekly for approximately 4 hours. Non-free choice programming occurs when our activities are embedded in various courses presented in classrooms during school days. In this iteration youth work on projects every class period over an approximately three-week period.   

Regarding how we highlight various elements of our programming, it really depends on the partner with whom we collaborate (e.g., school districts versus community-based organizations). That said, I suppose that in most cases we highlight both science/research and advocacy pieces (with slightly more emphasis on the science/research). Interestingly, we have seen that in cases where the science/research piece has been emphasized more, participating youth become extremely more interested in advocacy than they were initially.   

Currently, we provide youth with maps that we generate using ArcGIS, which are then employed in data analysis activities. In the future, we do intend to provide more opportunities for youth to develop mapping skills using more intuitive mapping apps such as Field Maps.

Thanks for answering so quickly! That makes sense, I was wondering what time commitment would be required for your cohort to design and create their own project. Great that there are multiple options for engagement, both guided, short term, and open, long term.

It is indeed interesting that the science can drive the advocacy interest, and not the other way around. That is definitely a significant finding, thanks for sharing this as well!

Hi Ravanasamudram:

One way that we address the issue of the need for pre-requisite science knowledge is by first engaging youth in hands-on activities that provide experiences that will at least familiarize them with crucial content they will need to engage in research activities in meaningful ways. In our case, that content is primarily related to what NGSS refers to as “science practices.”  In addition, we assign youth with content learning tasks that we expect them to execute during times when we are not together. When working in schools, we commonly rely on classroom teachers to prepare youth by presenting some content prior to our engagement with their students.  

Thanks for the great question, Francheska! We do indeed have English learners who participate, particularly youth who speak Spanish. We want to help spread this information and action through all communities, not just those that speak primarily English!

In terms of recruitment, we do this in a number of ways. One way is through our existing partnerships in local schools. We already work in the public schools were there are a multitude of different languages spoken. Teachers, administrators, and even students we have worked with in the past are an important aspect of this. We also have strong partnerships in many East Bay communities, many of which work directly with non-native English speakers. We can either do direct recruitment through them, or we will "plug in" to one of their existing programs. Once we are working a lot in one community, word of mouth helps a lot.

During the program, we encourage students to use each other as resources (no matter what language they speak). This features a lot of collaborative work, in which we can strategically pair students of varying English language comfort levels, so they can work in whatever language they feel most comfortable. Bilingual educators also help bridge some of the language challenges, and all of our materials (for both in-class and in-community use) are in English and in Spanish. If we are working with youth who speak a language other than Spanish, we can have written activities translated in advance, or modify activities to support. Some youth also return to the program multiple times, and are then in a more "leadership" role and can assist.

Hopefully this answered your question. Thanks for checking out our project! 

Hi Janet: Thank you for this poignant question. Off the top of my head, the following are three insights that may be useful to those interested in attempting to replicate programming similar to ours to some extent:

• It is very important to develop and maintain a broad network of partners within a particular community, which at the very least should include school districts and a variety of community-based organizations focused on addressing crucial educational, social, and environmental justice issues. That said, one must be mindful of the fact that maintaining close relationships with such entities will require sustained effort largely due to the fact that operations (including those related to schools) in this particular ecosystem frequently experience funding shortfalls and related high rates of staff turnover.

• In establishing partnerships in a given community, another critical need is for effective messaging that clearly conveys the manner in which science/STEM-related approaches and practices are connected to social justice issues upon which numerous potential partners are focused. In some cases this may not require so much effort, e.g., education-related entities, however, in some instances providing a clear understanding of interconnectedness may require more thoughtfulness, e.g., the relationship between STEM-related programming and economic justice.

• A very important element necessary for the effective presentation of programming similar to ours is the creation and use of a curriculum that effectively facilitates the development of science practice skills along with the understanding of the value of employing such practices to address community-related social justice issues. A key to ensuring the maximum effectiveness of such a curriculum is that it consistently solicits and encourages youth and community input.

Hi Suzanne: Thank you for your post. We would indeed be interested in connecting to explore ways of collaborating. I suppose we should communicate via email for the time being. I can be reached at: kcuff@berkeley.edu

fantastic! i'll reach out to you from my nyu email suzanne.dikker@nyu.edu