Community-driven science and science education: Living in and navigating the edges of equity, justice, and science learning

Profound equity and justice-related challenges persist in promoting community engagement with science. The intersecting effects of multiple pandemics—racial and economic injustice, COVID-19, gun violence, and climate change, among others—have all shaped when, how and why people engage with, or even have access to, science. There is also a growing public distrust in science, with broad-reaching implications. The antivaccination movement, one manifestation of the distrust of science, has substantively shaped the course of the COVID-19 pandemic (Tsipursky, 2018). From “alternative facts” to climate change denial, there is increasing public rhetoric, driven by corporate and political interests, that any empirical position can be denied because it does not fit with one's wishes or desires.

In the face of inequitable access to science, distrust, and debate on what can even be considered verifiable information, many look to science education to rescue society from this destructive spiral. Surely, we just need to find better ways of engaging people in science? Yet, the culture and practice of dominant science has been used to justify racism, and to position particular ways of knowing, doing, and being as outside the realm of science. By “dominant science,” we mean the particular forms of Western science that have become dominant to the point that “other ways of knowing, doing, and being are deemed illegitimate or are erased” (Liboiron, 2021; p. 21). The historical lack of inclusion of multiple voices and perspectives in decision-making around scientific issues and in the production of scientific understandings, a lack of transparency of how science is done, including insights into who controls the agenda, whose knowledge counts, and who benefits, all shape how and why communities may—or may not—engage in science. Consequently, a significant divide exists between the scientific community and many members of local communities. Among these tensions emerges the notion of community-driven science.

Consider Flint, MI, a city home to primarily African American families, where 40% of residents live in poverty. In 2014, residents of the city began complaining of discolored and foul smelling and tasting water. However, the city and state were slow to respond. It took a resident-organized effort in collaboration with outside researchers at Virginia Tech University to document what was to become known as one of the “most significant” environmental injustice events of “recent history” (Pauli, 2019). They documented low levels of chlorine in the city's water that led to high levels of the bacteria that causes Legionnaires' disease, and the heavy metals leaching into the water supply at levels in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act (Zahran et al., 2020), lead to highly elevated levels of lead in children's blood. All of this resulted from the entanglement of economic, political, and structural inequities that led to a state-level decision to save money by changing the city's water support from treated Huron River water to untreated Flint River water (Pauli, 2019). The health and safety impacts of the decision to prioritize saving money over people's well-being only became known because of the collective work of residents.

The Flint water crisis is just one of many science-related issues that affect the well-being of communities that could have had a more positive outcome if governmental and scientific institutions took everyday people's observations seriously. Health care, food, the environment, climate, energy production, digital surveillance, genetically modified organisms, and disease transmission are just a handful of areas of study that all demand cooperation between science and society. Recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic illustrate that not only has distrust in science increased, science itself has become politicized. Partisan divisions mark almost all aspects of the pandemic, from how seriously the threat to public health was treated, to the uptake of misinformation about the virus' origin, possible treatments, and the safety of vaccines. People and communities can play a vital role in helping to define the problems that are worth investigating, in generating sources and forms of data, and in offering interpretations for the future of this planet. But for this to happen, scientists need to acknowledge and better understand the needs, interests, and knowledge of people and communities. Even further, most scientists have not necessarily been educated or encouraged to support community engagement as part of their efforts.

At the same time, many different communities may not understand, trust, or engage with the scientific enterprise, for historicized and self-protecting reasons. We noted above that communities of color, and low-income communities, such as the people of Flint, MI, have powerful historical reasons for this distrust (Ramirez-Andreotta, 2019), as these communities have been often ignored or silenced by the scientific community in dehumanizing and harmful ways. The field of science education is both partly responsible for these problems, but is also key to addressing them. So while some progress has been made in scientists and government agencies listening to local community science observations and expertise (e.g., Dosemagen & Parker, 2019), and conceptual discussions of the relationship of citizen science, ecojustice, and science education (e.g., Mueller & Tippins, 2012), there is a gap in explicitly examining, with empirical research, science education as part of the problem and solution through community-driven science.

How the field of science education grapples with these equity- and justice-related concerns around community participation in science is a central concern for the field, and a variety of approaches have been introduced both within and outside the field of science education. From the professional scientist's perspective, there has been some focus on community participation in science, but primarily a broader push toward “public engagement in science.” Historically, this has meant “intentional, meaningful interactions that provide opportunities for mutual learning between scientists and members of the public” (AAAS, 2018). This approach has been heralded as a way to decrease the tension between science and society. However, while a good first step, current efforts to promote public engagement have also been critiqued for (1) lacking more authentic and substantive forms of engagement by communities themselves, particularly communities historically marginalized by science and society or (2) limited efforts to have such engagement transform the processes and outcomes of science (Jadallah et al., in Review, Stilgoe et al., 2014). Additionally, approaches focused on “public participation in scientific research” (Shirk et al., 2012) and “citizen science” (Bonney et al., 2014) do go farther in inviting members of the public into scientific research through participation in data collection and the generation of new scientific knowledge, but these are still focused primarily on projects driven by professional scientists and often lack roles in the decision-making for community members. Community science, typically defined as more community-driven and focused on community needs (Dosemagen & Parker, 2019), gets closer to the equitable cogeneration of knowledge that benefits local communities, but nevertheless as a term has been more recently muddied to include scientist-driven efforts (Cooper et al., 2021).

The goal of the special issue on community-driven science is to develop deeper understandings of the variations in and possibilities for community-driven science, and to produce new understandings of and discourses on the role and possibilities for community-driven science within science education contexts: what it is, what it looks like, what people learn, how it is practiced, and its implications for democratizing the knowledge, practice, and discourses of science and science education.

For us, community-driven science is more than engagement; it is about tangible and intangible relationships between knowledge and skills produced by science for the benefit of the community. Relationality is central to community-driven science because it situates people, place, and the environment (politics, history, and culture) at the heart of doing and knowing science, rather than at a distance to suffice presumed notions of objectivity. Additionally, one of the foci of community-driven science is that science, in all its forms, is contributory to the community wellbeing rather than extractive.

The idea of community-driven science is not new to the field of science education, even if it has been marginal to research, development, and reform efforts. Indeed, powerful previous work has focused on everything from preservice science teachers learning to use local environmental justice issues as contexts for learning (Varelas et al., 2018), to young people in a summer program collecting water quality data at their local creek and presenting to their city council (Ballard et al., 2017), to “fence-line” organizations using their own air monitoring samples to fight a chemical plant (Ottinger, 2010), to youth organizing through STEM investigations to transform local injustices through place-based scientific inquiry (Birmingham et al., 2017; Morales-Doyle, 2017; Upadhyay et al., 2020) and engineering design (Nazar et al., 2019).

We seek to build on and expand this work to develop a framework for what community-driven science might be with respect to science teaching and learning. We use this overarching term to frame how people, collectively, engage with science, in their local contexts, and in ways that position them as critical stakeholders and decision-makers in the processes and outcomes of science, in ways that are consequential to their own learning and for broader social change. We view community-driven science as involving community members in the scientific process early on as co-owners of a research agenda that is for the wellbeing and social futures of the community and its members. This stands in contrast to more traditional citizen science approaches typically studied in science education contexts, where the agenda is created and owned by professional scientists (e.g., Brossard et al., 2005, Phillips et al., 2018), though many scholars discuss the conceptual potential for more co-created participatory to promote science learning (Bonney et al., 2016; Roche et al., 2020). Our conceptualization links closely to the long and rich history of community-based participatory research in public health (Israel et al., 2013) and environmental justice (Bacon et al., 2013), as well as community science approaches that also foreground community questions and leadership in primarily air and water quality monitoring (Dosemagen & Parker, 2019; Wilson et al., 2018). However, we focus on community-driven science not only to steer away from the debate around terminology in the citizen science and community sciences fields (Cooper et al., 2021; Eitzel et al., 2017), but also to emphasize the particular decision-making roles of community members with respect to science and science learning, and to focus on the ways that the work benefits the community and its members, not just benefits from their participation.

In the remainder of this special issue introduction, we map the terrain of community-driven science using the manuscripts of this issue, delving into three key themes that help us reveal the tensions and contradictions inherent in this often-fraught work. This mapping then allows us to examine the ways community-driven science seems to offer a space in the borderlands between science and communities such that working in “the edges” between worlds increases the possibilities for fostering equity and justice even as it fosters new roles in doing better science. Lastly, we offer the implications these studies have for both research and design in science education.

As we move forward as a field, we must consider how we are responsible and accountable to the varied and powerful forms of community-driven science that exist already, and also how we might design for widespread opportunities to unfold. In this special issue, scholars offer new and different insights into how the field may define community-driven science in support of equity and justice-oriented teaching, learning, and design work. In this last section, we dig more deeply into how and why community-driven science offers a unique space, or set of conditions and drivers, for new forms of science teaching and learning. Consider the concept of “edge effects” in the field of conservation biology. In the locations where two habitats come together, a forest and a grassland, for example, each habitat has its own different temperature, moisture and even soil conditions, as well as different biodiversity of flora and fauna. Rather than a hard boundary, a third kind of habitat with a gradient across each of those conditions exists as a kind of blurring from one habitat to the other; this space is a habitat edge (Ries et al., 2004). In conservation, typically we are concerned with conserving the biodiversity and ecosystem services of each of those “interior” habitats, such that extensive research has been done on how far the negative edge effects penetrate into the interior, threatening the total area covered by rainforest at a landscape scale, for example. But looking closely at the edges themselves, researchers also find positive edge effects, where new ecological communities emerge near habitat edges (Ries et al., 2004); edges actually may often increase biodiversity, because the conditions across the gradient allow for plant and animal species from both kinds of habitats to occupy the same space at the margins of their preferred conditions.

We suggest that community-driven science serves the same role for science learning, by bridging and blurring the boundaries between science and communities. Community-driven science creates new spaces and conditions for community members and scientists to develop new and different roles and relationalities in the work of knowledge building about the world. Taking on these new roles and relationalities can foster identity development in ways that allow people to not only see themselves in command of Western science tools and practices, but also to be seen as experts on their own terms. It can also help to create new legitimized roles in Western science that did not exist before, that reshape the cultural norms of science and science learning to reflect a diversity of knowledge sources and ways of knowing. Rather than focusing only on conserving the conditions and inhabitants of each separate sphere of what is valuable for science learning, standardized tests on one side and lived experiences on the other, for example, community-driven science creates the conditions for negotiation, complementarity, and collective knowledge-building as part of doing and learning science. These negotiations between scientific rigor and community relevance are extensively discussed by scholars of participatory action research (Bradbury & Reason, 2003), a kind of community-driven science, and taken up explicitly by Tan & Faircloth in this issue. These negotiations could be considered a key mechanism through which community-driven science can foster more just science learning experiences.

The manuscripts in this special issue take up provocative, unusual, or previously ignored or marginalized perspectives on what it means to do science, and where science happens. Drawing from Black Feminist Theory: “The margin should not be seen only as a peripheral space, a space of loss and deprivation, but rather as a space of resistance and possibility. The margin is configured as a space of radical opening” (Hooks, 1989, p. 149) and creativity, where new critical discourses take place. These positive edge effects of community-driven science reflect Gutierrez's (2008) notion of a collective Third Space or hybrid space, describing a blending and bridging between learning environments that can allow for and foster a more expansive learning, and where “students begin to reconceive who they are and what they might be able to accomplish.” Within the work of community-driven science, the edges and margins are complex sites of political struggle where the challenges of doing science unfold in different ways from the mainstream, and also where particular science/community ecologies and original territories might emerge and thrive. Working in the edges, community-driven science is constantly questioning how barriers to participation in science get erected and policed in science discourse. What are the “borders” of science and community-driven science? What do these borders call attention to? What's “inside” and “outside” the edges? What makes up the liminal space in-between?

Across articles in this issue, we see how authors grapple with the edges of community-driven science as powerful spaces of negotiation and science co-production. We see this in O'Neill et al.'s and Tan and Faircloth's description of how educators and youth coconstructed new, third spaces through people and place and incubating epistemologies. Such work is fraught, however, as such work involves, as Tan and Faircloth note, “grappling with ambiguity from existing on borderlands.” In cases where youth minoritized by dominant white settler-colonial society, which includes the very culture and practice of science, it takes time and space for youth and educators to figure out how to engage ethically and responsibly in science in ways that acknowledge, value, and legitimize their humanity. Community-driven science work provided that time and space. Each paper in this issue critically notes how expanding views of science and of community actively disrupts and transforms the dominant narratives and cultural practices that, as Tan and Faircloth describe, build and amplify alienating messaging built into the spaces and social structures of science/science education.

Working in the edges, community-driven science requires attention to how connections across landscapes that link areas of habitat, called “corridors” in conservation biology (Hilty et al. 2019), are created, and the inherent tensions therein. Such corridors in community-driven science are important because they make visible the powered relationalities—including the inherent risks—across the landscapes. Figuring out what the edge distance is or could be, how wide corridors may need to be to provide enough of the right kind of habitat of the “interior” habitat type that allows wildlife (and all the associated organisms) to cross and live within that corridor, are all questions related to power, vulnerability, and the possibilities for thriving and well-being.

For example, Tofel-Grehl (this issue) uses the construct of the margin to make visible that which western science erases, shifting the terrain that can make possible authentic constructions of self and community within community-driven science. She explores how one Indigenous Hawaiian youth, Leilani, navigates her own disconnect with STEM while serving as a land protector on the Mauna Kea volcano, the home of the Thirty Meter Telescope being built over the objection of the local Indigenous community. Using the construct of silenced margins, such as when schools avoid controversial socioscientific issues, which in this case involved avoiding any discussion of the Mauna Kea due to the controversy and thus of Leilani and her community, Tofel-Grehl, shows how it was the explicit avoidance of conflict that reinforced the disengagement of Hawaiian students and community from meaningful participation in science learning. She further shows how it is within these “silenced margins” that youth and communities form their opinions and perspectives on the value of science and the scientific community. This is what can result from keeping borders rigid and ignoring the potentiality of corridors that allow for working in the edges.

Likewise, Vakil et al. illustrate the agency that youth, educators and communities have in authoring real and symbolic corridors toward engaging and critiquing science/technology in response to the power dynamics that frame participation—especially when participation requires sociopolitical solidarity toward jamming power widely held societal norms. What could it mean to the field of science education when collaboratively designing for edge work becomes central? Here, we see community-driven science as cultivating corridors for powerful learning and agency that is just and equitable between the interior figured worlds of dominant science and local communities.

In this special issue, we aim to shine light on how and why the field of science education can and should be concerned with understanding equity-centered approaches to communities’ participation in science, especially in communities historically silenced, and its impact on people's learning and participation. This includes highlighting the intersections of community-driven science with the potential possibilities and historically embedded vulnerabilities of the communities in which this work may take place. We hope our collective work here contributes to the knowledge base for the field by making sense of how the work of community-driven science in marginalized communities recognizes their vulnerabilities with, toward, and of, science, while also mobilizing knowledge inherent in those communities.

Thus, undergirding this special issue are a set of commitments that shape this collective inquiry that we hope pushes the work of science teaching and learning forward. First and foremost, community-driven science is of and for the wellbeing of communities and their members. It involves a wide range of people—youth, adults, and/or combinations—working on questions and problems that are authentic to both the disciplines of science and to communities, where data generation and analysis can potentially lead to answering those questions or problems (Morales-Doyle, 2017). Science participation is of, within, and for communities (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2010). Second, community-driven science supports participants in learning–about science and community and the ways in which they intersect through the concerns at hand (Birmingham, et al., 2017; van Wart et al., 2020). We suggest that when these commitments are met, community-driven science will foster and support science teaching and learning practices that open up, rather than shut down, just and equitable futures for ALL members of society, especially those that have been historically shut out or harmed by dominant science.