RAPID: Understanding Family Environmental Literacy Development and Decision-Making During Wildfire Disruption and Recovery

In January 2025, Los Angeles faced a series of devastating wildfires, notably the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire, which collectively destroyed over 18,000 structures and led to the evacuation of more than 200,000 residents. These fires continue to profoundly impact schools and families, requiring new forms of environmental literacy and community public health efforts. In recognizing the complex decision-making and intergenerational STEM learning taking place because of the fires, it is urgent to collect data that can better illuminate how families interpret scientific information they encounter and build on STEM literacy for the solutions they generate. The research questions guiding this RAPID project are: (1) What learning opportunities have families encountered as they managed wildfire disruptions to daily life? What science-based resources are schools and community organizations providing and how are parents scaffolding and extending these resources to sustain their children's learning? (2) How are families developing new environmental literacy practices as they cope with dynamically changing risks to health and well-being, and how are digital and social learning resources taken up? (3) What current, emerging, and ongoing learning opportunities do families face as a result of environmental disaster? This project explores how families affected by the January 2025 wildfires in Los Angeles are developing just-in-time environmental literacy practices to navigate evolving health and safety challenges during the ongoing recovery process. Leveraging two different ethnographic approaches to understand a wide variety of perspectives, this project looks across multiple parenting perspectives and data sources to conceptualize family STEM learning. This project combines traditional ethnographic methods with a linked remote multimodal diary study involving 100 parents of K-5 school-age children from various neighborhoods across the Los Angeles region. Face-to-face interviews and observations will guide questions for the broader regional study, while insights from the remote diaries will inform ongoing ethnographic inquiry. This dual approach captures both broad community patterns and nuanced individual experiences. Family-centered approaches to climate adaptation including theoretical development are needed. Despite being at the forefront of coping with climate-related disruptions, families may be overlooked in policy and research, leaving a critical gap in understanding how they collaborate, navigate, learn, and adapt during crises. Retrospective accounts often risk overlooking the dynamic and iterative nature of these adaptive processes, masking critical features of the barriers encountered and the ingenuity displayed in overcoming them. By documenting these processes as they happen, this project will provide actionable insights into how informal STEM learning environments, including family environmental learning practices, can support resilience, creative problem-solving, and collective well-being during and after crises. This RAPID project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing everyone multiple pathways for accessing and engaging in STEM learning experiences. 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.