My Place in Puget Sound: a Collaboration Between Ocean and Learning Scientists to Empower Youth to Action within Their Communities

Education research has shown that K-12 students have difficulty processing "doom and gloom" information and will “shut down” in response to scary news about the environment (Karpiak and Baril, 2008). SoundCitizen and the University of Washington’s Institute for Science and Mathematics Education will present strategies used in My Place in Puget Sound, a curriculum that engages students with contemporary environmental science research to understand how land use and personal practices affect the presence of pollutants in local waters.  My Place in Puget Sound approaches human impacts on the marine environment in culturally responsive ways that connect to students’ sense of place, empowerment and community action (Tzou et al., in preparation; Bruner et al., submitted).  Unlike many environmental education programs that prescribe specific actions and decisions, the goal of the My Place in Puget Sound project is to develop pedagogical strategies to empower students to make decisions that are informed by science but also take into consideration their cultural practices and values.

SoundCitizen research focuses on a series of natural and man-made chemicals that are in common use in or around households (personal care products, foods, soaps, medicines, detergents, cleaners, car-care products and lawn products). By focusing on these chemicals, My Place in Puget Sound provides a learning environment  that connects the environmental science to students’ everyday practices.  This is done through several pedagogical strategies. For example, students interpret local maps with visual representations of scientific data and generate maps of watersheds in their neighborhoods that reflect personally relevant activities and locations that may affect how pollutants are traveling into Puget Sound.

Self-documentation is another strategy for students to relate the science they are learning to places and practices that are relevant to their cultures and identities.  The professional development for educators who piloted this curriculum focused heavily on supporting classroom discussions around lessons that address the intersection of science, messaging and values in how we make decisions.  Our curriculum supports students in being critical consumers rather than promoting specific behaviors, and the culmination of the curriculum is a community action project carried out by students and shared with scientists, students and educators at a poster session at the University of Washington. 

My Place in Puget Sound is scaffolded to create interactions with data from environmental research that are scientifically authentic and allow students to identify with the scientific enterprise as discovery of the unknown in complex systems.