Collaborative Research: Known Rivers: Creating Justice-Centered Water Literacy along the Lower Mississippi River

Marginalized communities disproportionately experience the effects of environmental degradation such as sinking infrastructure, urban flooding, and coastal land loss as a result of legacies of segregation and lack of access to resources. To support youth in Black and Afro-Indigenous communities in Southeast Louisiana, the research team will work collaboratively with local community organizations to develop and enact a justice-centered framework for water literacy that responds to children’s experiences and concerns about the environmental water issues that impact their everyday lives. The project will contribute to knowledge of how community-engaged science curriculum and teaching projects build relationships between communities and schools and how students and teachers grapple with the justice dimensions of issues that have disciplinary and social implications. In partnership with a network of public charter schools in New Orleans, Louisiana, the research team will engage in four years of design-based research that centers community knowledge and lived experience. Guided by a steering committee of local water-focused community leaders and organizations, the team will work with approximately 16 teachers and 640 students in grades 3–8 to develop and study the implementation of the justice-centered water literacy curriculum units. Additional products will include professional development tools designed to amplify the community’s experiential and historical knowledge as central to science learning. This collaborative project is funded by the EDU Racial Equity in STEM Education activity, which is supported by the Directorate for STEM Education (EDU). This activity supports research and practice projects that investigate how considerations of racial equity factor into the improvement of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and workforce. Programs across EDU contribute funds to the Racial Equity activity in recognition of the alignment of its projects with the collective research and development thrusts of the four divisions of the directorate. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.