Bridging People and Nature with Environmental Exploration & Action: Youth Participatory Action Research and the York City Nature Challenge

Dr Smriti Safaya, Research Associate at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI York)

Research group: Citizen Science Research Group at SEI York

Summary

This case-study is a collage of approaches I have used to build stronger connections between people's ideas and action towards the natural world. From using participatory action research with school students and teachers in Hong Kong, and making our research approach widely available to educators, to encouraging people around York to contribute to biodiversity research, sometimes with inspiration from soundscaping and nature journaling activities. These strategies have tapped into open research practices of collaborative research, sharing of research processes for reproducibility and developing transparency through inclusive public engagement.

Case Study

Having been a teacher for many years in Hong Kong schools, I learned from my students about the transformative power of experiential and 'hands-on' learning. With a background in geology and earth sciences and having a love of fieldwork, it became clearer how the best learning happens 'where the action is'.

During my PhD, I sought to amplify the often less-heard voices of students in their environmental educational contexts through a youth participatory action research (YPAR) project about climate change education and action. In the midst of my postdoctoral fellowship at Environmental Sustainability at York (ESAY), I engaged in public engagement work using exploratory nature walks and the York City Nature Challenge to help people appreciate the accessibility and transparency embedded in biodiversity citizen science. Citizen science is when the public engages in research with experts, often around scientific questions of significance to their local or regional community. Such approaches incorporate open research practices, and citizen science is a recognised approach to do open research as part of the UNESCO Recommendation for Open Science (a document I contributed to the development of).

UoY trained student facilitators engaging a member of the public along the Foss Fairy Trail during the York CNC to encourage observing wildlife

In the YPAR project about climate change and action in Hong Kong, I collaborated with local and international school students and teachers, an initiative that is unfortunately not the norm in educational research due to challenges with differing curricula across these two school types. As this was a novel research approach we all were participating in for the first time, we purposefully used democratic decision-making across all stages of the research and dissemination process, and dissolved hierarchies to address any student-teacher power structures by giving equal voice to everyone on the 18-person research team (comprising 12 students and four teachers from four schools). We learned much along the process from collaboratively generating the research scope to paper-writing and publishing, and to aid others in this process, we created a resource packet (see link and QR code below) that has been presented at various international conferences and seminars about environmental education.

Logos of some of the partnering organisations and groups involved in York CNC 2024.

The beautiful city of York and the picturesque lake-centred campus of the University of York lends itself very obviously (to me anyway!) to exploring the wildlife we live, work and study amongst. What started as a way to enjoy being curious in nature through soundscaping, nature journaling and recording plants, animals and fungi on the iNaturalist open-access platform (a free smartphone app & website), led to a longer term campaign to engage the wider community in citizen science activities which bring people and nature closer together. Collaborating with many local and regional groups across York for the City Nature Challenge, I learned about differing priorities between collecting quality research data and broadening public engagement, and tried to strike a balance between addressing varying needs and interests of everyone involved. My hope is that the openness by which anyone can contribute to research through nature-based citizen science, like using iNaturalist, will spark a movement to bridge people's connection to and responsibility for the natural world we are a part of.

Pie-charts showing total observations (12,835) for York CNC (in the categories of research grade, needs ID and casual), and total number of species identified (1,481, with plants, insects, birds and fungi being the most observed groups).

Pie-charts showing species and observations recorded for York CNC 2024

Links

YPAR resources: a mini guide on how to conduct participatory action research with students, based on our approach: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mO0oEuAEtamtSdPPXtKtvfKgHZz2o37h2hbn4wOYiqQ/edit?usp=sharing

York City Nature Challenge on iNaturalist: City Nature Challenge 2025: York

SEI story about the York City Nature Challenge 2024: https://www.sei.org/features/qa-york-city-nature-challenge/

Funding

Croucher Foundation Science Education Funds

Licensing Information

Except where otherwise noted copyright in this work belongs to the author(s), licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License