Engaged Environmental Science: Empowering Students and Communities through Accessible Learning

Background:

The National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences and the Texas Association for Environmental Education have called for targeted efforts to engage underserved youth in environmental education programs that support environmental literacy and contribute to the development of a diverse workforce pipeline for environmental science-related occupations. The success of these efforts are critical as evidence suggests that occupational interests among low income and minority youth are more likely to be incongruent with post-secondary educational aspirations than other racial and ethnic groups. One approach that has been shown to be successful in attenuating discordant college and career expectations among underserved youth is building networks for information sharing between secondary and post-secondary students.

Program background:

To increase knowledge transfer around topics in environmental health science and environmental justice and facilitate the building of collegiate networks, a curriculum was developed by Texas A&M University, community engagement partners, and faculty at Furr High School. The program was designed and implemented by graduate students at Texas A&M University, most of whom also come from groups that are underrepresented in STEM. The curriculum was developed according to the occupational interests of Furr High School students’ and culminated with a campus tour, where students attended informational sessions hosted by departments that would provide the education required to achieve student career aspirations related to environmental health science.

Evaluation Methods and Results:

Community-engaged scholarship is inherently challenging. Initial lesson proposals highlighted a tendency among graduate student leaders to defer to a the traditional format of teaching, whereby a formal lecture would be used to convey key concepts and a worksheet would provide a means of evaluating concept proficiency. The iterative process of lesson development entailed early and frequent feedback from instructors at Furr High School and Texas A&M University and enabled timely redirection that fostered greater student engagement through experiential learning. Efforts to ensure that content was tailored to the unique backgrounds, interests, and cultures of Furr students resulted in a locally responsive program; however, these efforts simultaneously detracted from the program’s generalizability and transferability. Evaluation of community-engaged programming is also difficult because the traditional metrics of success in academia and the means in which they are measured may not be feasible or appropriate.

Conclusions:

By working collaboratively, Furr High School teachers, local environmental advocates, and academic faculty, staff, and graduate students were able to develop and deliver an accessible, culturally sensitive, and language appropriate environmental sciences curriculum, contributing to the development of the next generation of environmental scientists, natural resource stewards, and civic leaders.

Implications for research and/or practice:

Though tailored to the students it was intended to serve, the collaborative approach to the development of and lessons learned from this program are readily transferable to others seeking to promote community-level environmental health literacy. In practice, the core elements of this program can be applied to engage minority youth in environmental health education, support the establishment of college-linking networks for high school-level students, and promote opportunities for graduate students to acquire hands-on experience in lesson development and teaching.