Citizen and community science projects often include collaborations among scientists, educators and environmental professionals, yet opportunities for students to practice such collaborations are often limited at the undergraduate level. This talk will share the experience teaching a hybrid (online/in-person) course which connects biology, environmental studies, and teacher education students to prepare them to be professionals with citizen science and pedagogy skills. This interdisciplinary course was led by faculty from the Biology Department and Education Program, complemented with both in-person and virtual visits with education, science outreach, and citizen science practitioners (e.g. professionals from national and international citizen science projects, local non-profits, museums and science centers, and K-12 teachers). Students explored the theory of and application of citizen science and pedagogy from each other’s perspective, participated in shared experiences as citizen scientists in large-scale campaigns, engaged in independent citizen science research, worked collaboratively and independently in citizen science platforms, and interacted professionally with practitioners during class meetings.
Results/Conclusions
This talk will share the design, learning objectives, and pedagogical methods employed in this course. It will provide examples of how to structure exploration of citizen science from an ecological and natural history research perspective to meet the learning needs of science, environmental studies, and teacher education undergraduates. It will report on the projects students engaged in that applied their discipline specific knowledge and skills related to citizen science and the products they produced for partners/collaborators both on and off campus. Having taught this course multiple times the lessons learned, improvements, and student feedback will also be shared.