Community, Science and Education: An interdisciplinary perspective for facing ecological crises in Mexico and South America

In Mexico and the South American region there is a need to share knowledge across educators, scientists, teachers, community leaders and policy makers in constructing ways to bring education close to the concerns and needs of marginalised communities. We will be working with communities facing pressures related to global challenges of poverty, health access, water supply and climate change. Our focus is on the strategic GCRF challenge of education and, specifically, sharing expertise in making primary and secondary education relevant to the socioscientific issues faced by communities in Mexico and South America.

Initially we will convene work in Mexico and focus on the educational responses required to support communities in preparing for and preventing crises related to environmental and health pressures brought about by water shortage and water contamination. In Mexico and South America such issues are complex and related to poverty and access to services. Our approach is to bring together interdisciplinary expertise with the aim of proposing an educational response relevant to the local and specific conditions of those communities and schools. Our principled belief is that a normative sharing of "best practice" or "what works" (perhaps still the predominant approach) will inevitably fail to meet the specific needs of communities facing different challenges in different contexts. Our Network will begin with particular issues in identified communities and grow in a modular manner, incorporating other groups and other challenges and sharing the diversity of approaches needed to bring education close to lived issues. The Network will act as a repository for skills and expertise in which we stay close to community concerns, learning with and through those academics and non-academics who have experience and connections in the communities involved. We will be documenting our on-going work via a website, established and maintained in Spanish and English.

We will concentrate initially on two areas: rural communities from the Tlaxcala state; and, urban communities from Mexico City. Members of our team have been working with rural communities from Tlaxcala state since 2005, engaging in ecological research aimed at determining the adverse effects of environmental pollution on the health of children and people living near to the Atoyac River, the third most polluted river in Mexico. The team also has existing links to communities in the Xochimilco and Iztapalapa areas of Mexico City, where inhabitants face severe environmental and water issues. Having established networks with two communities in each region, we will then build to work with six further communities in Mexico, again engaging in immersion meetings in those communities, collecting our new knowledge at plenary conferences and disseminating via workshops to teachers and via work with policy-makers.

We will move from the particular to the general, sharing knowledge about how to bring education close to community concerns. We will disseminate our learning internationally and exploit our international links in order to progressively include colleagues from Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and other South America countries in which marginalized communities face environmental crisis. We anticipate being able to share the stories and resources generated in each of the communities with whom we work, and also articulating our learning about the process of working in inter-disciplinary teams and effecting educational change. Both sets of learning will be significant in terms of putting the case to influence educational policy, to support schools in paying attention to community concerns, and in terms of bidding for funds to continue the life of the Network beyond this grant.

Our ultimate purpose is to make an impact on the education of marginalised children in school in South America, through policy change and classroom innovation that lead to the curriculum coming close to the concerns of local communities.

The project will impact four main groups:
1) community groups and leaders.
2) teachers who attend dissemination workshops and, through them, the students in their classrooms.
3) teacher educators who join the network.
4) policy makers.

How will the impact be created?
The network will share expertise in order to understand the needs of communities facing ecological crisis, to understand the scientific issues related to these needs and to understand how educational responses can be created. In the initial stages of networking activities community leaders and representatives (1) will be centrally involved and they will benefit from an increased scientific knowledge of the ecological issues they face.

The inter-disciplinary work will lead to practical outcomes in the form of workshops for teachers (2), teacher leaders and teacher educators (3). At these workshops there will be materials produced, relevant to the particular communities within which we work and created by network members. Teachers will be supported to plan how to adapt the content of their teaching so that curriculum aims are met, while addressing the particular issues, related to water, faced by the communities around those schools.

We recognise that curriculum change and teaching innovation are not straightforward to achieve and the role of policy makers (4) will be critical. The network will engage with policy makers from the start and there are specific dissemination events planned towards the end of the two years where we will share our learning. We do not yet know the outcomes of our networking, of course, however it seems likely, to support the on-going innovations likely to arise from meetings, that there will be a need for explicit opportunities in the curriculum for different schools to focus on issues of relevance to their communities. At present, in Mexico, the curriculum in Science and Mathematics is structured via text books which contain tasks for every lesson. We will be working both to find the spaces within those schemes where more local work can take place and to shift policy towards explicit support of such activity.