Community-based environmental monitoring goes to school: translations, detours and escapes
Julianne Lynch, Efrat Eilam, Martin Fluker & Naomi Augar
Pages: 708-721 | DOI: 10.1080/13504622.2016.1182626
Abstract
Community-school partnerships are an established practice within environmental science education, where a focus on how local phenomena articulate with broader environmental issues and concerns brings potential benefits for schools, community organisations and local communities. This paper contributes to our understanding of such educational practices by tracing the diverse socio-material flows that constitute a community environmental monitoring project, where Australian school students became investigators of and advocates for particular sites in their neighbourhood. The theoretical resources of actor-network theory are drawn upon to describe how the project – as conceptualised by its initiators – was enacted as both human and non-human actors sought to progress their own agendas thus translating the concept-project into multiple project realities. We conclude by identifying implications for sustaining educational innovations of this kind.
Keywords: Environmental monitoring, Actor-network theory, place-based education, community partnerships, innovation
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504622.2016.1182626
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