High-School Students’ “Calls to Action” on Environmental Issues

• In Event: Political Science Education as Participatory Research & Civic Empowerment

Abstract

The climate crisis demands new approaches to education that prepare younger generations to identify, analyze and act on environmental conditions in their communities. Civic environmental science (CES) is such an approach. In CES residents of a community determine issues of concern, collect data, and act – echoing Elinor Ostrom’s contention that it is the “people on the spot who have the strongest incentive to get the solution right”. We report results from a decade of documenting cohorts of 10-18 year-old students’ (majority Black and Latinx) participation in CES projects. Working in teams, students collaborate with teachers and community partners to identify, collect scientific (air or water quality) and civic (local government policies, commissions, bonds) data, and generate a “call to action” to decision makers and members of the public. Informed by Ostrom’s work on groups that are effective in stewarding their “common pool resources” our data point to core elements of CES that should figure in education to prepare younger generations to mitigate impacts of climate change in their communities: 1. Understanding human interdependence with the natural environment in the local community and students’ capacities to impact it; 2. Understanding the political actors whose policies and practices impact that environment; 3. Collective action (peer and intergenerational teams) to nurture identification with the group and its task; 4. Working with community-based organizations to effect change; and 5. Students’ communicating “calls to action” to local decision-makers and fellow members of the public.

Authors

• Constance Flanagan

• Erin Gallay, University of Michigan

• Alisa Pykett, University of Wisconsin-Madison