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. In framing this special issue, we intentionally used the term “community” to challenge the field to consider who owns the science agenda and whose voices count, how and why. We use the term “community” to refer to people who are bonded together through place-based locations and history, with shared interests, concerns, social structures, and norms, acknowledging these shared dimensions are dynamic and are frequently contested as communities develop over time (Agrawal & Gibson, 2001). The manuscripts in this special issue call our attention not only to a wide range of communities but also challenge us to consider what constitutes community and who decides. Across the manuscripts in this issue, authors remind us of the varied and entrenched ways that onto-epistemologies in science have “been treated as fixed, agreed upon, or “settled” (Bang et al., 2012, p. 302), anchored in White western norms and values” (Tan & Faircloth, this issue). Such anchoring—in curriculum, pedagogy, legitimized content and practice—reproduces dominant ways of knowing, while omitting, subsuming, and erasing others. As we see in these manuscripts, community-driven science not only expands the onto-epistemologies and practices of science through its rootedness in people and their relationship to place, it also challenges the racial, class, gendered, sexuality, linguistic, and citizenship status hierarchies that result. Indeed, all of the manuscripts challenge what science is—what defines science as a way of knowing and a set of practices, discourses, ideas and ways of being. Across these texts, community knowledge, in history and in practice, disrupts what counts as science that “matters,” with special attention to the needs and desires of communities most marginalized by dominant society. Consider that for many youth and communities, science/STEM invokes histories of harm. This onto-epistemological shift gives witness to the lives and histories of families and communities, and in ways that refuse advancing histories of harm (Tuck, 2009). At the same time, drawing on the rich history of environmental justice and health research used by activists in the United States (MacIver et al., 2022), many of the authors in this issue offer ways that Western or “dominant science” ways of knowing and creating knowledge (Liboiron, 2021) can be co-opted and employed strategically by these same communities to change policies that affect their lives and livelihoods, from using pollution science in Arizona (Ramirez-Andreotta et al., this issue), to foregrounding Indigenous knowledge of climate change and its impacts in a Nunavut community while also acknowledging Western science's contributions (Rahm et al., this issue). This kind of epistemological witnessing and reconstruction, in form and function, is foundational to the studies presented in this special issue. Consider Tan and Faircloth's study that followed recently resettled refugee girls in their weekly, STEM-rich maker program. These authors show how youth co-opt the practices and tools of science as they negotiate their resettlement process in the new community where they live. By nesting the lived experiences of the girls within the context of a community-authored STEM-rich maker program, the authors make a case for how and why a community-driven science can and should be built around a set of emerging “incubating epistemologies.” The authors use this term to call attention to collaboration processes that attune to, and allow knowledge formation to grow from the tension between everyday experience and robust STEM experiences. Such tensions yield new and shared discourses, coproduced artifacts, and new social relations. In this way, incubating epistemologies as community-driven science, are a form of epistemological witnessing and world-building in, with, and through science. As the authors deftly illustrate through ethnographic narrative, what incubating epistemologies make visible are not only the varied lives lived, insider knowledge and wisdom of youth experiencing re-settlement as refugees, but also the power structures in refugee communities that both facilitate and constrain their possibilities for being in STEM in diverse and culturally sustaining ways. Youth's utilization of the STEM program itself as a tool to shape their community as a broader reflection of their desires frames their community as “not immutable,” offering the youth many possible presents and pathways forward, and the role of STEM in those pathways. Just as the authors challenge the role of science itself, they expose powered questions about community. They illustrate how enactments of community-driven science are contingent upon participating more powerful adult allies willingly engaging in allied political struggle to reform the dual/dialectic toward just outcomes. This involved everything from bearing critical witness to the questions, needs and desires that drive youth-authored investigations in STEM/community to strategically procuring materials and resources in support of youths' maker efforts. Across the manuscripts in this issue, we see community-driven science involving youth and adults working on questions and problems that are authentic to both the disciplines of science and to their own community, where data generation and analysis can potentially lead to answering those questions or problems (Morales-Doyle, 2018). These build on the ways that science participation can be of, within, and for communities (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2010). Community-driven science seeks to democratize science, including the inquiry and decision-making processes associated with it, and of the ways in which science is taken up by, with and for community participants (Coburn, 2005). These manuscripts challenge us to consider who is community, what is community, and where is community. Indeed, the geographic diversity represented in this article set makes visible the importance of people and place and history in framing community-driven science. For example, the experiences that Inuuit youth have in northern Canada as they learn to care for the land (Rahm et al., this issue) significantly differs from Black and Latinx youth in Chicago who engage critically with technology to understand and challenge dominant racist norms around race and surveillance (Vakil et al., this issue). Leveraging wide-ranging onto-epistemological frameworks including Inuit and Native Hawaiian indigenous frameworks, critical race perspectives, critical data and critical technology literacies and practices, the relationships between power and knowing in science is scrutinized. As O'Neill and her coworkers (this issue) state, “Building on the argument that certain cultural practices that constitute “knowing about the world” are defined by people who are in positions of power (Gutiérrez et al., 1995), we wonder what ways of knowing and what knowledge bearers are excluded by the use of the term science.” O'Neill and coworkers, who are two practicing teachers, center community-based problem solving as a way to connect community and Hawaiian knowledge systems of the place (e.g., indigenous, ancestral, traditional, and Western). Learning from place involves learning from the people—the kūpuna [ancestors] and the moʻolelo [stories], as well as to “asking and providing kōkua [help/support] and engaging at the invitation of the people in the place.” The practice of community-driven science can at times contribute to decolonizing science itself, or anticolonial science (Liboiron, 2021). As the practice centers the relational work of learning from people and place, doing science expands beyond doing knowledge and practice. It expands to centrally and integrally including a learning journey that integrates developing a critical consciousness of one's sense of place and its multidimensions with western and Native Hawaiian ways of knowing, buttressed by a kind of humility that “enables participants to elevate the knowledge of the place and its people first” and “engages in real-world problems solving as a reciprocal rather than transactional processes.” Yet as these authors rightly note, as the field of science education expands the knowledge systems it includes within learning contexts, expansion needs to be tied to legitimization, thereby shaping the norms, discourses, practices, goals, and outcomes of learning. As these authors state: “We argue that incorporation of indigenous knowledge is not just valuable for indigenous youth, bridging indigenous and Western knowledge systems is required for humanity to engage in more thoughtful and sustainable problems solving.” Yet, O'Neill and her coworkers show that peeling back layers of science/community takes time and is a fraught process. Schools are not set up to take the time to learn about the ideological and political dimensions of a place like the students were able to do by forming new relationships with Uncle Mark and his Ohana. But if community-driven science is a practice of decolonization, then the people and their stories provide the relational and curricular guidance such work demands. We view learning, education, and scientific inquiry to be world-building endeavors, and if we are to proceed as a field in pursuit of prosperity, joy, and justice, we must honestly reckon with the realities of deeply entrenched racial and economic inequities that remain indelible aspects of U.S. society. Broadly, the authors in this special issue call attention to how and why people engage in science toward reimagining and remaking their worlds toward more just futures. They actively engage in acts of knowledge-, practice-, self-, and community-production and action that allow youth and adult participants to be, and become, in liberatory and self-determined ways. This work is intergenerational, interinstitutional, and interdependent. For example, Clegg and her coworkers bring us into the world of university-level Division 1 athletics, the “most competitive and commercialized level of collegiate athletics within the US” with extensive budgets directed at robust sports analytics. This sociopolitical context disproportionately affects young Black men, and contributes to a struggle to balance athletic, academic, personal, and familial commitments. As Clegg and others have suggested, elite collegiate athletes exist in the liminal space between academics and athletics, amateur and professional—“student-athletes” whose accomplishments on and off the field are distilled to that which advances the wealth of universities and their corporate partners. Clegg and her coworkers raise up new liminal spaces that athletes negotiate daily as they navigate their student-athlete trajectories—that of source/producer/user of data. They at once live their lives and experience their own data in sport, while they are under the watchful eye of more powerful others in nearly all aspects of their life—from sleeping and nutrition, to bodily performance. These authors challenge us to see, through the eyes of elite athletes, how community-driven science happens in places we, as a field of science education, might not typically recognize. By illuminating the agency that athletes enact to engage, resist, and coopt critical data practices in support of their performance and well-being, Clegg et al. show how athletes' engagement reflects a collective response to systemic racial, equity, and justice issues inherent in sport institutions. Here, we see how questions around who and where is community in community-driven science involves deep consideration of the “social, political, and historical contexts that community members must navigate.” Indeed, the kinds of subaltern worldbuilding happening among college athletes is a kind of community-driven science that has the power to rehumanize, beginning in small moments and local spaces, the liminality that athletes experience. Clegg et al. show us how athletes, as both sources and producers of data, are uniquely positioned to explore technical, social, and political aspects of data science in a context in which they are deeply embedded. These engagements produce “felt data” that athletes authored and leveraged toward fighting back against the athletic community practices that prevented well-being. We can see, then, how community-driven science foregrounds a kind of agency and action-taking that involves naming and confronting injustices, refusing erasure, and coconstructing new hybrid forms of discourses, knowledge, and practices; this allows people to coproduce socioscientific-cultural artifacts that restory their worlds and science itself. This is a fraught process because it involves naming and challenging power structures. Vakil et al.'s article makes visible the tensions and contradictions involved in efforts to “honestly reckon with the deeply entrenched racial and economic oppression” that youth of color experiences in STEM and in society, here in the United States and globally. This takes form in negotiating not only what the focus of community-driven science might be (e.g., documenting inequitable technology-driven surveillance practices) but also what the outcomes of such efforts might be for both individuals (e.g., production of multimedia artifacts to make visible their insights) and communities (agency and jamming power). Such work requires those who represent societal structures of power in STEM (e.g., university researchers and scientists) to re-see and re-think their own subjectivities in relation to youth and communities and the possibilities for worldbuilding through community-driven science. Vakil et al. directly address issues of power and agency in the possibilities for youth and communities to engage in community-driven science/technology. Using the context of an after-school technology program, and the sociopolitical context of surveillance of black and brown youth in urban communities, these authors show how one function of community-driven science is in interrupting, subverting, and creatively “jamming” systems of inequitable power—toward the well-being of youth and communities. Here, jamming power is explored as “a disciplinary-specific mode of agency that can be used to explain not only the practices of community-driven science activists, but also as an analytic tool for designing for programs and community organizing.” Ramirez-Andreotta et al. (this issue) challenge the typical delineations of who can own and do science by focusing on one urban and three rural communities in Arizona investigating pollution cases from unlined landfills to electronics factories to historical and active mining Superfund sites. Each community centered around one or more promotoras, women with local knowledge and leadership who are knowledge mediators that help promote and mobilize their neighbors around public health issues, who partner in asking questions, collecting, and analyzing soil and air samples, and using their findings for advocacy. These women and members of the community Vakil et al. describe, also show the possibilities for what it might mean to bring together a network of community actors, in the latter case from arts organizations, churches, after school groups, and university researches, to co-design for community-driven science. Community-driven science and science education is an ethical practice strengthened by relational trust and sociopolitical clarity. The manuscripts in this special issue foreground the ethical, or how people engage with each other, community, and science toward affecting people's lives, social relations, and possibilities (Vakil, 2018). Each one of these studies names just possible futures as a guiding ideal, a hoped-for outcome of their efforts. Each one of the studies are indicating that the best community-driven science starts, ends, and grows with “relationship,” which is more than connection. At the same time, each one of these manuscripts offers powerful descriptions of how movement toward these ideas is grounded in relationalities that open up possibilities for being and becoming (relational trust), while also bearing critical witness to structures of power and oppression (sociopolitical clarity, see McKinney de Royston et al., 2017). Findings illuminate how engaging community health at the intersection of history, race, place, and power shaped engagement in community-driven science practices and supported student sense making in ways that surfaced challenges, tensions, and opportunities for disrupting and reimagining community narratives. Visitainer's study makes a compelling case for how a teacher's, Felicia, sociopolitical clarity oriented her to engaging students in the relational explorations of health inequities as she challenged students to question dominant narratives of places, people, and forms of relationality that negatively impact community agency. The practice of community-driven science was built around engaging “critical inquiry and data analysis of the impacts of unjust policies and practices on the health outcomes for communities of color” while also centering “unified forms of relationality in the classroom that directly contrasted with dominant forms of individuality in society that she sought to problematize and disrupt.” Acts of relational trust toward new possible futures as the work of community-driven science took many forms in this classroom. The teacher positioned herself as a member of the community and placed herself in the statistics they sought to engage and critique. She promoted social closeness and critical collective care by physically moving the class so they were in close proximity to each other and described the social relations of the class as “family.” She explicitly elicited and leveraged youths' cultural practices and lived experiences as instructional resources and as central to the doing