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• Date of publication Jan 21, 2016 Category: Article

  "We're not going to be guinea pigs;" Citizen Science and Environmental Health in a Native American Community

  by Elizabeth Hoover

  Determined to learn the extent to which a local contaminated site was impacting community health, the Native American community of Akwesasne reached out to a research university, eventually partnering on the first large-scale environmental health community based participatory research project (CBPR). Based on interviews with scientists, community fieldworkers, and study participants, this article examines the ways in which collaborating on these studies was beneficial for all parties — especially in the context of citizen science goals of education and capacity building — as well as the challenges they faced, including communicating the limits of what scientific studies could accomplish for the community.

  Volume 15 • Issue 01 • 2016 • Special Issue: Citizen Science, Part I, 2016 (PCST Stories / 1)

• Date of publication Sep 29, 2015 Category: Commentary

  Moving beyond the seductive siren of reach: planning for the social and economic impacts emerging from school-university engagement with research

  by Richard Holliman , Gareth Davies

  In the past 25 years school-university partnerships have undergone a transition from ad hoc to strategic partnerships. Over the previous two-and-a-half-years we have worked in partnership with teachers and pupils from the Denbigh Teaching School Alliance in Milton Keynes, UK.
  Our aims have been to encourage the Open University and local schools in Milton Keynes to value, recognise and support school-university engagement with research, and to create a culture of reflective practice.
  Through our work we have noted a lack of suitable planning tools that work for researchers, teachers and pupils. Here we propose a flexible and adaptable metric to support stakeholders as they plan for, enact and evaluate direct and meaningful engagement between researchers, teachers and pupils. The objective of the metric is to make transparent the level of activity required of the stakeholders involved — teachers, pupils and researchers — whilst also providing a measure for institutions and funders to assess the relative depth of engagement; in effect, to move beyond the seductive siren of reach.

  Volume 14 • Issue 03 • 2015