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Applied pedagogy, and specifically service learning, bridges the university educational experience with hands-on training. Such pedagogies in STEM are nuanced in unique ways in comparison to more classroom-based STEM learning and applied teaching outside of STEM contexts. As STEM service learning may be especially vulnerable during system shocks, we advance work on such pedagogy by investigating how a certain type of pedagogy, specifically caring pedagogy, may be particularly useful during social disruption (i.e., COVID-19) in applied STEM learning. The main purpose of this study is to examine how pandemic-related disruptions impacted teaching and learning in a service-learning STEM program known as the Environment Corps. We thematically analyzed longitudinal data from multiple rounds of interviews with seven instructors, one-time interviews with thirteen undergraduates, and eight instructor meetings occurring from late 2019 to early 2021. Similar to findings in related work, teaching and learning obstacles from the pandemic were personal, interpersonal, and logistical. After instructors realized they needed to implement changes, some obstacles were ameliorated through caring pedagogy practices outside of in-person interaction. Yet, even as disruptions lessened, students and faculty still experienced impacts from the pandemic. We offer insight into how applied STEM courses can be adjusted with an eye toward caring pedagogy-informed practices to minimize negative effects from system shocks. This contributes to the literature on disaster and COVID-19-related challenges, caring pedagogy in virtual spaces in teaching circumstances, and environmental education.

An extensive faculty partnership at the University of Connecticut (UConn) that reaches across college and departmental lines is engaged in a project that seeks to enhance, expand, institutionalize, and study a new model for community engagement. The model, called the Environment Corps (E-Corps), combines the familiar elements of classroom instruction, service-learning, and extension outreach to create a method of engagement that aims to benefit students, faculty, surrounding communities, and the university community itself. This article describes the structure and history of E-Corps; details the institutional setting, faculty partnerships, and pedagogical strategies involved; and discusses early evidence of impacts and future prospects.

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.

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.

High Leverage Practices (HLPs), as a core set of teaching practices, represent important instructional priorities and provide instructional guidance for students' engagement in practice-based instruction. The goals of this research were to: (1) understand how an epistemic community (the people designing and leading courses and programs) viewed the HLP creation process; (2) understand the processes through which the epistemic community actually engaged in the refinement of the HLPS; and (3) identify and present the HLPs created. Data collected across the 2019-2020 academic year included interviews with seven instructors and seven students and four observations of the integration team meetings. First, thematic analysis revealed that the epistemic community members considered the process of creating and refining HLPs central to improving the quality of their instruction. Second, the processes through which the community engaged in HLP refinement included connecting experience and feedback with educational research, identifying the purpose of instructional strategies, sharing practices for instruction, and creating a model for course expansion. Third, the HLPs produced included: (1) eliciting students' initial ideas; (2) informing approaches to problems; and (3) developing informed solutions to address community environmental challenges. This work informs in the literature, especially in applied STEM education, about HLP creation in the context of an epistemic community.

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.

Service learning has many documented benefits for students. The benefits to the communities are less clear. This study examines the unfolding of an environmental service-learning partnership from the perspective of one participating community liaison. We examine a new model of university-community engagement, where undergraduate students are paired with a local community to address environmental issues in courses that focus on adaptation and mitigation. We use actor-network theory (ANT) to explore the experiences of one community liaison, focusing specifically on factors that helped build and maintain the partnership and produced benefits for the community. Findings highlight the community liaison's agency in negotiating partnership goals and determining the definition and treatment of environmental concerns. We conclude by identifying the insights an ANT perspective holds for service-learning and community-engagement research and practice. Plain Language Summary: Service Learning as Community Partnership Service learning has many benefits to students, but the impact on the community is less clear. This study explores a university-community environmental service-learning partnership from the community's perspective. Undergraduates take courses in environmental issues and are paired with local communities to help address these issues. We focused on one partnership that produced benefits for the community and found that nonhuman entities helped this partnership develop. Additionally, agency and representation play an important role in how the community and environment are defined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

This research analyzed two years of data from a 5-year NSF-funded informal STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) program. Our program aims to support development and maintenance of STEM identities in intergenerational teams learning geospatial technologies and conservation science to develop and implement community land-use projects. The conservation science and technology identity (CSTI) surveys were developed as a potential method to characterize and quantify a person's STEM identity. The surveys examined five identity constructs for science and technology: competence, performance, external recognition, self-recognition, and ways of seeing and being. CSTI was administered before the workshop to evaluate the participants' historical STEM identity, and after to determine the workshop's impact on science and technology competences and ways of seeing and being. CSTI was also administered as a delayed-postsurvey after the year-long project was completed. This work is needed due to: (1) the importance of the development and maintenance of STEM identity for persistence in engaging in science-related work; (2) the lack of reliable, quantitative measures supported by research on the constructs of identity; and (3) the need for development of empirical instruments to determine the impact of informal science learning programs on STEM identification.

AbstractThe 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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). 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. Data for this study was collected from 74 10th grade students in a high school in the Northwest region of the New England state. 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. 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. 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applied pedagogy, and specifically service learning, bridges the university educational experience with hands-on training. Such pedagogies in STEM are nuanced in unique ways in comparison to more classroom-based STEM learning and applied teaching outside of STEM contexts. As STEM service learning may be especially vulnerable during system shocks, we advance work on such pedagogy by investigating how a certain type of pedagogy, specifically caring pedagogy, may be particularly useful during social disruption (i.e., COVID-19) in applied STEM learning. The main purpose of this study is to examine how pandemic-related disruptions impacted teaching and learning in a service-learning STEM program known as the Environment Corps. We thematically analyzed longitudinal data from multiple rounds of interviews with seven instructors, one-time interviews with thirteen undergraduates, and eight instructor meetings occurring from late 2019 to early 2021. Similar to findings in related work, teaching and learning obstacles from the pandemic were personal, interpersonal, and logistical. After instructors realized they needed to implement changes, some obstacles were ameliorated through caring pedagogy practices outside of in-person interaction. Yet, even as disruptions lessened, students and faculty still experienced impacts from the pandemic. We offer insight into how applied STEM courses can be adjusted with an eye toward caring pedagogy-informed practices to minimize negative effects from system shocks. This contributes to the literature on disaster and COVID-19-related challenges, caring pedagogy in virtual spaces in teaching circumstances, and environmental education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An extensive faculty partnership at the University of Connecticut (UConn) that reaches across college and departmental lines is engaged in a project that seeks to enhance, expand, institutionalize, and study a new model for community engagement. The model, called the Environment Corps (E-Corps), combines the familiar elements of classroom instruction, service-learning, and extension outreach to create a method of engagement that aims to benefit students, faculty, surrounding communities, and the university community itself. This article describes the structure and history of E-Corps; details the institutional setting, faculty partnerships, and pedagogical strategies involved; and discusses early evidence of impacts and future prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The University of Connecticut's Climate Corps is an undergraduate program that focuses on climate change impacts and adaptation. Students take a class on climate change and then engage in independent study projects with community partners. Since its inception in 2017, 130 students have participated in the program, completing 38 projects with 28 community partners. The program not only provides assistance to towns in their adaptation efforts but also emphasizes workforce development, with 64% of responding students stating that their participation influenced their decision to work in environmental fields. The Climate Corps is now part of a larger program called the Environment Corps, which includes other initiatives such as the Stormwater Corps and the Brownfield Corps. Future plans include expanding into new areas such as GIS/Mapping Corps. [Extracted from the article]