NARST 2026 Where to find us!

We’re thrilled to share that members of the Center for Community and Citizen Science team will be presenting at this year’s National Association for Research in Science Teaching’s Annual International Conference, taking place April 19–22, 2026, in Seattle, Washington.

NARST is a global organization dedicated to improving science teaching and learning through research. Each year, the conference draws researchers, educators, and practitioners from around the world to share findings and push the field forward. This year’s theme — Joyful Transgressions and Radical Imagination in Science Education — invites attendees to explore how science education can forge deeper connections between scientific knowledge and social life across formal, informal, and lived contexts. It’s a theme that resonates deeply with the community-centered, participatory work we do here at the Center, making it a particularly fitting stage for our team to share their research.

Check out the schedule below to find the Center’s presentations as well as presentations we are excited to attend.

Sunday April 19th

Symposium 2:45-4:15 PM Willow A (L2)

Community Partnerships within Science Education Research: Building Trust and Reciprocity

Jadda Miller

In this symposium session, Jadda will discuss the Hoʻomalu ʻAina Maui (protecting the Land of Maui) project, a community-based participatory research project formed in response to the devastating 2023 Lahaina wildfire in Maui, Hawaiʻi. This project was developed with a Maui high school ecology teacher, a watershed non-profit, a cultural practitioner, and a biocultural conservation biologist. Through this project, they engaged 21 high school students in land stewardship and cultural revitalization to heal the land and themselves.

This collaborative work invites students to critical thinking about historical and current land use practices in Maui. Students explore how development, water diversions, and historic plantation agriculture have altered landscapes, revealing the consequences of disrupting traditional land stewardship practices. Through this critical examination, students grapple with colonialism not just as a historical phenomenon but as an ongoing system that continues to shape contemporary inequalities. This work challenges students to recognize their own positionality within these colonial structures and consider how they might contribute to more just and sustainable relationships with people and place. 

Throughout these experiences, we ask: How do high school students engage with and make meaning of braided knowledge systems when participating in post-wildfire land stewardship activities?

Our collaborative approach transgresses conventional researcher-subject relationships, positioning community partners, teachers, and students as co-researchers and knowledge creators. We engage in critical place inquiry (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015) as a decolonizing research praxis, utilizing collaborative qualitative coding and ‘ground-truthing’ as validation practices that embrace collective sense-making (Ghiso et al., 2019). We also engaged students in an ‘envisioning process’ (Smith, 2012) where they reimagine current land relationships and envision regenerative futures. This research contributes to community-engaged scholarship that prioritizes relationality, reciprocity, and responsibility grounded in partnerships and place.

Tuesday April 21st

Environmental Education and Sustainability Roundtable 

Roundtable Session 2- 4:15

Becca VanArnam and Peggy Harte

We Are Scientists: Science Identity, Language, and Cultural Relevance in Environmental Education

This session will look at our study that examines how participation in the FRYs Network, a community science program, shapes high school students’ science identity, with attention to language and cultural diversity. The program engages students from continuation and traditional high schools, juvenile detention facilities, a deaf and hard-of-hearing program, and college opportunity programs in monitoring salmon affected by vitamin B1 deficiency. Students collect and submit behavioral data, interact with researchers, and contribute to ongoing salmon conservation research. Findings have shown that students developed a stronger collective science identity (“we are scientists”) rather than individual self-identification as scientists. These results extend science identity literature highlighting the role of collective recognition in environmental education and suggest that integrating students’ linguistic and cultural resources may strengthen both individual and collective identities, fostering deeper connections between school-based science and home communities.

Roundtable Session 2 – 4:15

Emma Schectman 

Examining Adult Climate Change Educator Identity and Agency Shifts Across Professional Contexts

This research aims to gain understanding about how environmental educator identities shift as they adopt climate change education curriculum for adult audiences by observing and interviewing participants in a climate change education instructor training program. Teaching about climate change in a way that fully addresses the root causes and works towards effective adaptation and mitigation strategies can put educators at odds with their identities because of the potential to cause anxiety for their students. Professional identities (the way in which one sees themselves fitting in their professional context) are challenging to form which makes teacher training programs particularly important. Educators who do not have strong professional identities tend to avoid teaching about controversial topics and climate change education is considered controversial due to its politicized nature. As climate change increasingly affects all populations around the world, climate change education amongst adults is necessary as they have power to act and engage with climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts and their views affect the attitudes of youth. 

Sessions we are excited about:

10-11:30, 20 April Willow B (L2)

Cultural Considerations to Radically (Re)-Imagine STEM Education and Research

2:45-4:15, 20 April Virginia (L4)

Celebrating the Everyday in Science Learning Across Contexts and Lifespans
 

2:30-4:00, 21 April Columbia (L4)

Integrating Skills, Epistemologies, and Inquiry for Critical Thinking

2:30-4:00, 21 April Ballard (L3)

Operationalizing culturally responsive, relevant, and sustaining pedagogies

2:30-4:00, 21 April Willow A (L2)

Bridging Cultures and Knowledge: Fostering Cross-Cultural Connections in Indigenized STEM Education and Research

4:15-5:45, 21 April Willow A (L2)

Indigenous STEM Knowledge and Storytelling: Using Stories to Develop STEM Understandings for All Students