Chris Jadallah
Ph.D. Candidate, Science and Agricultural Education
Research
My research examines how community-based scientific research and monitoring projects can serve as sites for education, learning, and ultimately, social-ecological resilience. Specifically, I study how scientists, conservation professionals, and broader publics collectively learn and co-create knowledge through shared participation in these projects. I pay particular attention to the cultural, relational, affective, and embodied dimensions of learning across settings, with a special interest in how uneven power relations between actors can afford or constrain opportunities for multiple ways of knowing to be considered in environmental problem-solving.
I bring an interdisciplinary lens to this work, drawing from fields such as the learning sciences, science education, and environmental sociology to better understand how community-based environmental projects can be designed to:
1. Create and deepen opportunities for individuals and communities – particularly those historically excluded from environmental science and decision-making – to contribute their knowledge, values, and perspectives in shaping scientific and conservation endeavors.
2. Provide learners with opportunities to pursue their own interest-driven and personally meaningful environmental inquiries.
3. Disrupt conventional hierarchies that privilege the expertise of scientists and conservation professionals over the local knowledge and practices found distributed within communities.
This work is informed by ethnographic and interactional methods in addition to critical and sociocultural perspectives on learning. Central to my research is a commitment to community-based, engaged scholarship. This entails building close partnerships with diverse stakeholder groups to simultaneously co-design, organize, and study initiatives that bring together multiple actors to address real-world environmental problems. Ultimately, I am interested in uncovering strategies for designing and facilitating these types of learning environments so that they can better leverage multiple ways of knowing in service of healthy and just social and ecological futures.
While my previous research has investigated native bee conservation and diversified farming systems in California, my current work with The Center for Community and Citizen Science is situated within the context of community-based monitoring, dam removal, and watershed restoration at multiple sites in the Western United States.
Interests: community science, citizen science, science and environmental education, environmental justice, learning in informal environments, biodiversity conservation, social-ecological systems, adaptive management, stewardship
Education
PhD in Science and Agricultural Education, In progress
School of Education
University of California, Davis
B.S. in Conservation and Resource Studies, 2016
College of Natural Resources
University of California, Berkeley
Fellowships and Awards
National Science Foundation
2018-2023 Graduate Research Fellowship
Graduate Group in Education
2022 Award for Scholarly Promise
American Educational Research Association Environmental Education
Special Interest Group
2022 Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award
American Geophysical Union
2021 Outstanding Student Presentation Award
Contact
ccjadallah@ucdavis.edu
