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Short Abstract

We present an AI-supported platform that curates teachers’ practice-based narratives into a knowledge network, reconfiguring scientist–teacher dynamics and fostering scalable, inclusive learning across citizen science projects.

Abstract

School Participation in Citizen Science (SPICES) often unfolds within entrenched power relations, where scientists’ authority dominates and teachers are positioned at the margins. This risks silencing tacit pedagogical knowledge, even though such knowledge is essential for SPICES.

We address this challenge in the context of a network of citizen science partnerships, established within the Taking Citizen Science to School (TCSS) center, which brings together multiple SPICES projects. The network’s aim is to foster shared learning about integrating citizen science into schools. To support this goal, we developed a Web-based platform that curates a research-based repository of pedagogical design principles. Teachers’ narratives of practice, co-authored with dedicated chatbots are brought into workshops, where heterogeneous groups, including the storyteller, reflect on these stories and link them with relevant pedagogical principles. Through this work, participants generate a growing knowledge network that connects stories and principles across projects, contexts and expertise.

Our empirical analysis of workshop discussions shows how teachers’ voices, once peripheral, became central to shaping collective understanding. For example, when a teacher’s story from a digital humanities SPICES project was linked to a pedagogical design principle, a scientist from an environmental psychology project immediately recognized its relevance, sparking further rounds of cross-project learning. This process generated knowledge about integrating citizen science into school, forged only through the interplay of perspectives. In doing so, the workshops and the underlying platform reconfigure center–periphery dynamics by bringing teachers’ contributions to the heart of knowledge creation within citizen science partnerships.