Citizen Science: Real Data for a Real Need in the Real World

JAMES VANDE GLIND

Iam standing on the bridge in a local park near our high school in Fridley, Minnesota. It is a beautiful day to be outside. The leaves are still green overhead, but you can tell that fall is just around the corner. From the stream down below I hear the back and forth of several high school boys.

“Yes! I found one.”

“Fatmucket?”

“I am not sure, the edge is kind of rounded.”

“Probably just a Giant Floater.”

“At least it’s a live mussel! All you have found is dead Heel Splitters filled with sand.”

To any other park user, these young people standing knee deep in the stream might look like they are skipping school and calling each other names, but they are actually living out my deepest hope as a Christian school science teacher. They are caring for creation by doing real work to meet a real scientific need in the real world.

For the past three years, my students and I have been collaborating with freshwater mussel researcher Mark Hove. Our goal is to study the Fatmucket, a native freshwater mussel, and how its life cycle is impacted by road salt. We are doing real research. We are asking novel questions and setting up novel experiments. Unlike the tried and true experiments from my chemistry class, some of our experiments have failed, but then we improved them and tried them again. We are producing data that people outside of our classroom care about. In fact, in the past year, Mark Hove has published two articles sharing the data that our high school students helped gather, and we are working toward two more articles in the coming year.

What Is Citizen Science?

Producing data that other people care about is core to citizen science. An exact definition of what constitutes citizen science and what does not is still being parsed out. However, in an article pressing for an internationally recognized definition of citizen science, Heigl and his co-authors identify that “citizen science has amazing potential as an innovative approach to data gathering and experimental design, as well as an education and outreach tool.” They praise citizen science for “democratizing science” and for it being “science with and for society” (8090). As a high school educator, what citizen science means to me is that my students are participating in science that matters beyond the classroom walls.

For the past three years, my students and I have been collaborating with freshwater mussel researcher Mark Hove. Our goal is to study the Fatmucket, a native freshwater mussel, and how its life cycle is impacted by road salt.

As a high school educator, what citizen science means to me is that my students are participating in science that matters beyond the classroom walls.

The path was not straight but it certainly was serendipitous, and it started because of TfT’s push to have students do real work in the real world to meet a real need.

How Did We End Up in a Stream Studying Mussels?

Mussel research is not my first connection to citizen science. In the mid2000s I was introduced to the River Watch program run through Hennepin County. Since 2008, my environmental science students have collected and classified aquatic macroinvertebrates (insects). The county uses this data to measure stream health based on the sensitivity of each family and/or genus of insect to pollution. Each year our school completes this work and reports our findings to the county, meaning that there is now an archive with nearly fifteen years of data because of the work that students are doing.

Also in the past decade our school has adopted Teaching for Transformation(TfT) (for more about TfT see www.teachingfortransformation.org). One of TfT’s core practices is for students to engage in Formational Learning Experiences (FLEx), and it was during an afternoon professional development dedicated to FLEx development that I was prompted to imagine a way to continue to engage my science students in real work by connecting to a different stream, Rice Creek, which is located within walking distance of the school. I began by contacting the watershed district, and one connection led to another until I found myself standing in the wet lab at the University of Minnesota hatching plans with Mark Hove about how my students could partner with him to study the impact of salt on the life cycle of freshwater mussels. The path was not straight but it certainly was serendipitous, and it started because of TfT’s push to have students do real work in the real world to meet a real need.

Citizen Science and Kingdom Work

My youngest son loves to watch the PBS show Wild Kratts. The show teaches him a great deal about creatures from all over the world. Historically speaking, it is remarkable that a five year old growing up in Minnesota would even know about the existence of a ring-tailed lemur or a pangolin. And now that he knows about them, he cares about them. He cares about habitat loss in Madagascar and poaching in Asia. In his five-year-old way, he wants humanity to steward these creatures well.

To see him care about these creatures in this way is both uplifting and frustrating. I am thankful and encouraged to see my son’s care of God’s creation being nurtured. However, it is also clear that there is no real pathway for him to exercise that care. There is almost nothing that he (or I) can do that would help steward these particular creatures well. We simply live too far away.

Citizen science lets my students stand in awe of their creator right where they are.

In my years doing citizen science projects with my students, one of the great blessings is that students get to know and love their local environment. Granted, the vision laid out in Scripture is that humans are to rule over, tend, and keep the whole of creation. Similarly, through his death and resurrection, Christ redeems every square inch of creation and encourages us to do the same. However, we are finite creatures occupying distinct moments of time and space. Citizen science lets my students stand in awe of their creator right where they are, and it shapes their attitudes toward their local ecosystems. Those attitudes prompt them toward real stewardship of the square inch where God has placed them.

It should be noted that not all citizen science projects are local. For example, N a Sa enlists the help of citizens to search images of space in a project called Stardust@Home. The thing about all the citizen science projects is that they are real. Students engaging in the real world gather real data to meet a real need. As they carry out this real work, students get to be order discoverers, creation enjoyers, earth keepers, and ultimately God worshippers.

Where Can You Begin?

If you’re looking for an easy citizen science option, there are a number of small-scale, relatively simple projects that you can join right now. For example, the Izaak Walton League of America runs the Salt Watch program. Ninth-graders at our school participate in this program by measuring chloride concentrations in the snowmelt. The procedure takes about five minutes, and they can do it on their own street corner (www.iwla.org/water/ stream-monitoring/salt-watch). Our middle school students have contributed to BudBurst, a project run through the Chicago Botanical Gardens, which has individuals report what plants are doing in their neighborhoods at particular times of the year. National Geographic has another twentyplus ideas here: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/ citizen-science-projects.

If you’re looking for an easy citizen science option, there are a number of small-scale, relatively simple projects that you can join right now.

While I suspect there isn’t a university researcher for every science classroom, I have a hunch that if we reached out, there may be some more serendipitous connections that could be made.

If you’re ready for something more in-depth, I encourage you to design your own project. I wish every teacher could have someone like Mark Hove to collaborate with. While I suspect there isn’t a university researcher for every science classroom, I have a hunch that if we reached out, there may be some more serendipitous connections that could be made. And we do not need to think of these connections as one-way streets. Mark Hove is quick to remind my students that their work allows him to do research on a scale that he simply cannot do on his own. Because we have a small army of eyes and hands at our disposal, we are able to imagine projects that just would not be possible otherwise.

Here are some starting points for designing your own citizen science project:

1) Reach out: a) to a local college or university b) to a local government agency (Department of National Resources, county parks, watershed districts) c) to a business that deals with creation care (for example, a landscape company that puts in rain or pollinator gardens)

2) Look around: a) Within walking radius of your school, is there anything noteworthy? Bodies of water? Natural areas? Is there data that could be collected that could help your community better steward that resource? b) How about on your school’s property? Could you have students gather data on storm water runoff for your school campus? Could that lead to making real changes to your property (e.g., parking lot design, rain garden implementation)?

3) Start with service: Sometimes the data we collect prompts us to take stewardly action, but the reverse can also be true. When we do work in the name of stewardship, we want to know if our work is making a difference, and usually this is determined by data. For example, sciencerelated service projects our students participate in include invasive species removal and native prairie seed collection.

Final Thoughts

Mark Hove and I are still dreaming. We have a handful of smaller research projects that we would like to complete. Each time we run one experiment, it seems like we find two or three new things we would like to explore in the future. When we dream big, however, Mark and I start to imagine a project where our experiments would help lead to the reintroduction of native mussels that have gone locally extinct in Rice Creek. We imagine students doing experiments that would help determine what fish could serve as a suitable host for those mussels.

Mussels are the most endangered group of animals in North America. My dream is that through the citizen science my students are doing, our local creek will see its mussel population rebound, and years from now, those same students will be able to come back and say, “I helped make that happen! We helped bring those mussels back to Rice Creek.”

My encouragement to you is to keep dreaming too. How might you use citizen science to engage your students in the real world, so that they can collect real data that can support and promote real stewardship of God’s creation?

Work Cited

Heigl, Florian, et al. “Toward an International Definition of Citizen Science.” Proceedings on the National Academy of Science, April 23, 2019, www.pnas .org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1903393116.

James Vande Glind teaches at Avail Academy in Fridley, Minnesota. He earned his BA from Dordt College (2004) and MA from Hamline University (2013). He has also been a TfT lead teacher.

Science-related service projects our students participate in include invasive species removal and native prairie seed collection.