Our Soil x Uptown Summer: Youth Participatory Science
Dan and Hannah joined the Uptown Summer teens on the second Wednesday of Uptown Summer to think about what it would mean for us to use science to analyze our environment for pollutants. Our discussion prompt was a quote from two science education researchers who wrote that “science is one way of knowing that produces powerful insights and dangerous oversights that emerge from its development as an institution of Western imperialism” (Morales-Doyle and Frausto, 2021). These researchers propose situating science within a particular framework that they call Youth Participatory Science, which they compare and contrast to Youth Participatory Action Research in their work.
We looked at the guidance of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that no amount of lead in the body is known to be safe. We then related this health guidance to the various regulations of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on lead in air, water, and soil, and built some physical intuition about the meaning of these regulations to our health.
Figure 1 from