Environmental Science Agency: A strategy for biological conservation
Update: We’re pleased to share a new research brief: Fostering Environmental Science Agency in Youth-focused Community and Citizen Science. This product gives a basic overview of the concept, with examples, and an explanation of how we observe ESA in our research.
The YCCS Team’s new article in Biological Conservation [1] shares findings from our first round of YCCS case studies. We analyzed data from in-school and community-based programs, looking for when and how participation became meaningful to youth people and to the communities and audiences that projects spoke. Seeing that many of the young people were developing unique roles and personalized ways of interacting with the project, we adapted Angela Calabrese-Barton and Basu’s [2] idea of critical science agency to develop a framework for investigating and supporting environmental science agency (ESA).
An ESA lens helps us focus on when young people act (individually and collectively) with the tools of science in ways that are purposeful, personally consequential, and in service of more sustainable social-ecological systems. We really think the framework can become a useful tool for both researchers and practitioners as we develop projects and activities and ty to understand important forms of learning in youth & community citizen science. The framework helps draw a line between the day-to-day actions of young people in YCCS projects and the ways their science learning can lay the groundwork for future actions.
Looking closely at young people in the case studies led us three processes that we saw supporting trajectories toward environmental science agency: involving youth in sharing and dissemination of findings, fostering youth ownership of data quality, interacting with complex social-ecological issues. Explore the website to learn more about these high leverage practices and case studies. Or find the article here.
1. Ballard, H.L., et al., Youth-focused citizen science: Examining the role of environmental science learning and agency for conservation, Biological Conservation (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2016.05.024
2. Basu, S., Barton, A.C., 2009. Critical physics agency: further unraveling the intersections of subject matter knowledge, learning, and taking action. Cult. Stud. Sci. Educ. 4 (2), 387–392.
High Leverage Practices:
Youth Share Findings with Outside Audiences
Youth Take Ownership of Data Quality
Youth Engage with Complex Social Ecological Systems
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