The Environment Corps program at the University of Connecticut approaches community engagement by combining teaching, service learning, and extension work. This model of engagement harnesses the power of trained undergraduates in conducting meaningful and actionable projects for communities, building on the topical knowledge, outreach experience, and community contacts of seasoned extension professionals, and in turn expanding the reach of their programs. Over 175 projects have been completed in partnership with 96 municipalities, nonprofits, or other entities. The program has documented benefits to both students and partner communities. The program team is interested in assisting others to adapt the model.

The environment, science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics fields (a collection of fields we call E-STEAM) continue to grow and remain economically and ecologically important. However, historically excluded groups remain underrepresented in science and technology professions, particularly in environmental and digital media fields. Consequently, building pathways for historically excluded students to enter economically viable and ecologically influential E-STEAM professions is critically important. These new pathways hold promise for increasing innovation within these fields and ensuring a multiplicity of representation as these fields are shaped and reshaped to attend to the plural interests of diverse communities. Consequently, this conceptual paper describes an eco-digital storytelling (EDS) approach to engaging historically excluded populations in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This approach offers structured learning opportunities connected to learner interests and community needs with the aim of increasing E-STEAM identity and career interest of teens from groups historically excluded from E-STEAM fields. E-STEAM identity is a meaning one can attach to oneself or that can be ascribed externally by others as individuals interact and engage in E-STEAM fields in ways that foreground the environment. The EDS approach leverages community-based action, technology and digital media, and arts and storytelling as entry points for engaging learners. EDS is designed to increase teens’ content knowledge within multiple E-STEAM fields and to provide numerous technology-rich experiences in both application of geospatial technologies (i.e., GPS, interactive maps) and digital media creation (i.e., video, animation, ArcGIS StoryMaps) as a way to shape teens’ cultural learning pathways. Examples of rich digital media presentations developed to communicate the EDS approach and local environmental opportunities, challenges, and projects are provided that exemplify how both participation in and communication of environmental action can contribute to more promising and sustainable futures.

Background It is crucial to support students in better understanding water and sustainability issues because water plays a vital role in maintaining global ecosystems, including human life. A wide range of curricular and instructional supports like those embodied in model-based learning (MBL) are necessary for teachers to engage students in the core epistemic commitments of the Next-Generation Science Standards (NGSS).Purpose The main purpose of this study is to inform theory about students’ early attempts to engage in the complex kinds of sensemaking experiences inherent in the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the NGSS.Sample Data for this study was collected from 74 10th grade students in a high school in the Northwest region of the New England state.Design and Methods An explanatory sequential mixed-method research design was used to examine students’ learning outcomes, and to better understand these outcomes in connection to their experiences engaging in modeling in the MBL curriculum unit.Results The results indicated that students’ model scores, the number of concepts in models, and the coherence and sophistication of models improved between their initial and final models. Additionally, the following patterns emerged related to ways in which students engaged in the practice of modeling: (1) students attempted to directly represent what they observed, (2) they struggled to pictorially express complex patterns or mechanisms, and (3) students experienced difficulties representing models from a diverse range of perspectives.Conclusion The patterns identified across student models, as well as their reports of experiences related to the MBL unit implementation, provided insight into student experiences with models, while also providing meaningful implications for the refinement of the MBL curriculum unit investigated in this research specifically, while informing approaches MBL curricular units aimed at supporting NGSS implementation efforts more generally.

The Environment Corps (E-Corps) program emerged out of our goal to reciprocally serve undergraduate students and communities as they engage with faculty across E-Corps courses in collaborative environmental sustainability pursuits. Currently, the three E-Corps courses focus on brownfields, stormwater, and climate. The E-Corps program is a unique two semester sequence of coursework anchored in high leverage practices (HLPs) that we have collaboratively developed and worked to refine over the last several years. In this article, we describe the E-Corps program, our HLPs, and how these HLPs are used across the three courses.

Families create contexts for learning to enhance and support the interests of their children, while simultaneously teaching language, morals, and culture. This research examines intergenerational family teams engaged in a long-term conservation project in their community. Participants were interviewed during and after project completion with the central research purpose of exploring how the intersecting experiences of family members explain emerging family cultural learning pathways. Intergenerational family teams shared narratives which were then analyzed using the cultural learning pathways framework [Bell, P., Tzou, C., Bricker, L., & Baines, A. D. (2012). Learning in diversities of structures of social practice: Accounting for how, why and where people learn science. Human Development, 55(5-6), 269-284. doi: 10.1159/000345315] that we subsequently used to create family cultural learning pathways for each participating family. Family interactions are powerful influences on the identity development of children, not only in their academic development, but also in their moral, ethical, and social development.

The nsink package estimates cumulative nitrogen (N) removal along a specified flow path and is based on methodologies outlined in Kellogg et al. (2010). For a user-specified watershed (i.e., hydrologic unit code (HUC)), nsink downloads all required datasets from public datasets in the United States, prepares data for use, summarizes N removal along a flow path and creates several static maps. The results of an nsink analysis may be exported to standard geospatial files for use in other applications.

Discover remote strategies and technological tools that capture the “essentials” of a traditional in-person, place-based STEM field experience.

Researchers and practitioners have identified numerous outcomes of place-based environmental action (PBEA) programs at both individual and community levels (e.g., promoting positive youth development, fostering science identity, building social capital, and contributing to environmental quality improvement). In many cases, the primary audience of PBEA programs are youth, with less attention given to lifelong learners or intergenerational (e.g., youth and adult) partnerships. However, there is a need for PBEA programs for lifelong learners as local conservation decisions in the United States are often carried out by volunteer boards and commissions, which often have little formal conservation training. Intergenerational PBEA programs can provide an opportunity to bring together, in the case of this study, the unique skills and knowledge of teens (e.g., tech-savvy) and adults (e.g., knowledgeable of local community issues) that can lead to innovative ways of addressing real world endeavors that are relevant to participants and their communities. This study describes a program model that offers structured learning opportunities that support intergenerational partnerships (teens and adults) as they contribute to community conservation efforts. We used a design-based research approach to develop and refine program design principles and communication pillars for the purpose of supporting successful teen-adult conservation projects, positive participant experiences, and science identity authoring. The principles and pillars drew on identity, cultural learning pathways, and community conservation research literature as well as previously collected participant interview data from our intergenerational PBEA program. We outline four design principles and four communication pillars that are critical to facilitate collaborative teen-adult environmental action efforts and serve dual functions of providing program guidance and participant support. The aim of these principles and pillars are to establish collaborative team partnership norms that resist traditional hierarchical teen-adult relationships. Further, the principles and pillars consider how partners can draw on their interests, experiences, and knowledge of community, and utilize these assets along with conservation science disciplinary practices to accomplish meaningful science pursuits; thus facilitating how they identify themselves as contributing to science endeavors. Exemplar data and literature that support each principle and pillar are provided, and future extensions of these principles are discussed.

This research aimed to better understand the interaction between positioning and STEM identity authoring as intergenerational teams collaborated to complete community conservation projects, following a two-day conservation and geospatial technology workshop. Scientists and science educators supported these learners as they developed the focus, resources, timeline, and methods used to accomplish their negotiated pursuits at the two-day workshop and throughout their subsequent community project as a form of public engagement. To better understand the ways in which intergenerational teams located or positioned themselves and their partners, the ways in which teens and adults engaged in STEM identity authoring, and the interplay between positioning and STEM identity authoring a two-case study was completed. In this, field observations, interviews, and project artifacts were collected as the primary data sources. Findings emerging from the qualitative analysis of the data collected revealed how positioning and STEM identity authoring were found to be entangled and concurrently reinforcing even at the outset of the intergenerational teams' work. Additionally, positioning and STEM identity authoring in intergenerational teams were influenced by societal and cultural norms. These findings as well as recommendations emerging from the findings are further elaborated with the aim of supporting future intergenerational work of teens and adults in informal STEM learning contexts.

An in-depth curricular unit exploring the effects of human land use on local water resources was created as part of a Teacher Professional Learning Program at the University of Connecticut's Natural Resources Conservation Academy. This unit was designed to connect high school students to water resources in their community, both in the field and through the use of interactive mapping technology. These methods engage students in science and technology using multiple disciplines and can help them better understand how their local water resource is affected by the surrounding landscape. In this unit, students explore the dynamics of local water resources and the anthropogenic issues that affect them through field and open-access online inquiry-based activities. The varied lessons within this unit were purposefully created to align with the Next Generation Science Standards and to fit within either an earth science or a biology course. They use existing online geospatial tools and can be tailored to any geographic area of interest.

University of Connecticut Extension educators are engaged in a new program that fosters intergenerational informal science, technology, engineering, and math learning through combining geospatial technology and conservation science. Conservation Training Partnerships (CTP) is a program that brings together adult conservation leaders and high-school-aged youths for a 2-day hands-on training that leads to community-based conservation projects. The program creates synergistic project teams that combine the adult partners' community and conservation knowledge with the youth partners' technological facility. This innovative intergenerational approach holds promise for Extension professionals in improving technology-based trainings and projects.

Land use in the United States is largely dictated at the local level, by decision makers serving at the municipal and regional units of government. Since under this system state and federal regulation and policies can play only a limited role in influencing land use decisions, assistance to local land use officials is a critical need for the economic, social and environmental health of American communities. The Center for Land Use Education and Research (CLEAR) at the University of Connecticut is dedicated to the task of assisting local land use decision makers, through effective integration of its landscape research with the creation of analytical tools, technology training, and on-the-ground community outreach. The Center's research focuses on characterizing and analyzing the landscape and changes to it, using remote sensing and other geospatial data processing techniques. CLEAR technical tools and training focus on geospatial technologies and applications that enhance, rather than complicate, local land use planning; the approach is to disseminate information in a variety of formats, in order to maximize access by citizen and professional planners. CLEAR outreach programs conduct workshops for local officials that cover a wide range of topics related to natural resource-based planning, from open space planning to low impact development. Most workshops are informed by Center remote sensing data, and many are supported by Center GIS and web tools. On-the-ground changes at the local level demonstrate that this integrated approach can reap real benefits, despite the many challenges inherent in the land use decision making process. More resources, effort and consideration must be invested in providing integrated assistance for communities if academia is to have meaningful impact on land use issues.