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Short Abstract

This paper explores how more-than-human encounters in environmental citizen science can contribute to lived eco-citizenship in young people while they are in formal schooling.

Abstract

Drawing on doctoral research, this paper explores how environmental citizen science can contribute to lived eco-citizenship in young people while they are in formal schooling. The research took a qualitative, in-depth, multi-method, case study approach, exploring the experiences of school-based participants (n=74, pupils, teachers and scientists) across three different school-based citizen science projects. Drawing on place-responsive and new materialist orientations, situational analysis was the analytical approach applied throughout this research. A major finding is that environmental citizen science experiences offer opportunities to connect pupils with scientific research practices in a way that offers authentic citizenship opportunities not ordinarily available in schools. This paper will describe, in particular the the ways in which the eco-citizenship capability to ‘live with and in relation to the world of nature’ (Nussbaum, 2011) was found to be supported by more-than-human encounters during school-based citizen science projects. The inter and intra-actions with other living things as a part of the citizen science project provided a starting point to increasing understanding of and empathy with other species, and fear and disgust were reduced through exposure to invertebrates and other potentially fear-inducing organisms through citizen science projects. Being reciprocally responsive through place-based encounters within the environmental citizen science fieldwork experience afforded pupils the opportunity to think about and consider their impact on the environment in a more meaningful way than can be afforded in a traditional classroom setting, which is of value in our precarious contemporary environmental context.