Community-Engaged Research Projects in School Settings: Science Teachers’ Practices and Reflections

Community-engaged research (CER) is a justice-oriented research paradigm that emphasizes equitable and reciprocal knowledge co-production with community members and organizations, sharing power, benefits, contributions, and responsibilities among all participants. This study explores nine teachers’ cases of facilitating CER projects in their respective school settings, aimed to support students’ critical consciousness and action for environmental issues and injustices. This study contributes to educational research by adapting an existing framework for CER for environmental justice that can guide K-12 teaching and research on it. By analyzing data from teacher community meetings and individual interviews in the CER framework, this study articulates classroom practices that addressed the Distribution, Procedure, Recognition, and Transformation dimensions of CER, as well as the positive impacts and challenges of these implementations. The findings report teacher practices categorized by the CER dimensions they addressed (the what of the practices) and the instructional strategies they employed (the how of the practices). The findings also compare the frequency of these practices as an indicator of variation in teacher practices and illustrate this variation through three teachers’ CER cases. The findings also document the positive outcomes of CER in student empowerment, as well as the challenges related to time, resources, assessment, and stakeholder skepticism, underscoring the need for systemic support to enhance CER in school settings. The discussion focuses on the implications of these findings and ways to address the identified challenges through future research and institutional efforts.