Reflections on Teaching and Learning Chemistry Through Youth Participatory Science

Abstract

This chapter captures a panel discussion from the 2019 conference of Science Educators for Equity, Diversity, and Social Justice (SEEDS, http://seedsweb.org) in Norfolk, Virginia. The panel included two high school students, three high school chemistry teachers, a community organizer, an administrator for a large urban school district, and a university-based science educator. These panelists, the authors of this chapter, had been collaborating on an initiative to support youth participatory science (YPS) projects in high school chemistry classes. We share this lightly edited transcript of our conversation as a way to communicate perspectives about the opportunities and challenges of YPS from viewpoints across these constituency groups. Our conversation is organized around three questions for reflection: (1) What are some of the challenges and possibilities when it comes to engaging with YPS in science classes? (2) How has engaging in YPS exposed both insights and oversights of scientific ways of knowing? (3) In YPS, what are the relationships between learning science and engaging in political and community issues?

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“…5 Or, perhaps for older students, why don't our state standards for science education address climate change? Or what is it about the political history of our community that led to the soil or water becoming contaminated in the first place(Morales-Doyle et al, 2019;Tolbert et al, 2016)? Or, as we referenced earlier, in the case of engineering education, how can we advance technologies that are not exploitative of nature(Sanchez, 2023)?…”