Call for Participants
About the theme
Citizen Science is a genre of research connecting scientists and nonscientists around projects that involve advancement of science. Due to the proliferation of citizen science projects in the past decade, a growing awareness of their potential to enhance school practice has developed, with promising findings on aspects such as student learning, teacher professional-growth, and the participation of schools in leading educational change endeavors.
We view school participation in citizen science as an especially fertile ground for examining current conceptualizations within the Learning Sciences regarding what it means to learn in the networked society. School participation in citizen science has the potential to bridge where, when, how, why and with whom people learn. It creates new learning opportunities that extend beyond the classroom to everyday life. Moreover, such practice inherently involves diverse perspectives from various stakeholders (at a minimum—students, teachers and scientists), echoing this year’s conference theme regarding interdisciplinarity. The goal of this workshop is to share and learn from the practices and insights of participants’ work on the theme of school participation in citizen science.
Who should consider participating?
We invite participants focused on (but not limited to) four main “bridging” principles that help conceptualize school participation in citizen science:
- Bridge learning among students, teachers and scientists
- Bridge in-school and out-of-school learning
- Bridge school and community learning
- Bridge science and data literacies
Whether you are already involved in school participation in citizen science, planning to do so, or bring with you Learning Sciences conceptualizations that might be relevant to this theme and worth exploring with others, this might be the workshop for you!
If you are interested in joining this endeavor, please send us a 200-400 description of your perspective on school participation in citizen science by May 15th, 2020.
What to expect and what to prepare in advance?
Following the organizers’ introduction aimed at framing ideas within a preliminary conceptualization, we will devote the morning session to get to know each other’s perspectives on the workshop theme. This will be carried out via discussions around (small and simple) posters that we will ask you to prepare in advance. Then (after getting to know each other better during lunch), the afternoon session will enable participants to delve deeper into the suggested framework, and think together about possible next steps.
Anticipated outcomes
We view the school participation in citizen science workshop as a first step in coalescing an international community that will continue to explore this exciting theme, and advance it as an emerging field of research. Insights developed during the workshop will serve as seeds for future work for those who will want to continue the collaboration as well as others who will want to join. As a possible direction for this collaboration we envision developing a special issue on School participation in citizen science to be published in one of the leading journals in the field.