Hi Miyoku...thanks for your interest!

What successes have you been most excited about? Seeing teens and adults recognized as capable and knowledgeable participants in conservation work both by each other and by a larger community (e.g., local land use board, peers at schools). 

Biggest challenges to date: Framing the work of intergenerational teams so that teens and adults work as partners. While we have norms we emphasize to support all taking on roles as learners and leaders, historical and cultural norms of how adults and teens interact sometimes leads to the adult positioning the teen as the learner and the adult as the knowledgeable other. In some of these cases, the project seems to be something the adult partner is doing for the teen's benefit, instead of a valued community pursuit that will meet the needs of a local community and positions the adult to learn through participation. Would love to hear how others address these more deeply rooted traditions/norms.

Hi Miyoko, Thank you for your comment and questions! We just completed our first programming year and 14 of our 16 intergenerational teams completed on-the-ground conservation projects using mapping technology that benefited their communities. One of our challenges this year was making sure the teen/adult teams worked together as a team (both as learners and contributors) as opposed to as student/mentor. Both sets of intergenerational learners bring unique knowledge and skill sets, and both are learning new skills/information through their projects, but for some of our teams we found that the adult thought of the project as the “teen’s project” and that they were mentoring the teen. We are now making changes to an activity we have the teams do during the 2-day workshop on “working together”, to help them both see the unique attributes they both bring to their project and what they both can learn from the project.

One of our successes for our project was that 14 of our 16 teams completed their conservation project and presented it at one of two regional conferences that we made open to them (Connecticut Conference on Natural Resources & Connecticut Land Conservation Conference). Conference attendees were excited about the projects and our participants left energized, enthusiastic and proud of their accomplishments! 

Thanks for these insights, Todd and Laura. The intergenerational dynamic sounds really interesting. It seems similar to a challenge that I anticipate our project may encounter, not in terms of generations, but perceived expertise--lay audiences and expert scientists interacting and working together. We're hoping for collaboration with everyone in the roles of both learners and contributors.

As part of the Educational research piece, we conducted separate focus groups with the teens and adults during the conference in March when they showcased their work. Both teens and adults emphasized that scheduling time to work together and finding time to work on the project in general were challenges. The workshops took place in July, but many of the teams did not really get started until the fall. The adults noted that the teens were very involved in after school activities such as sports, band, and drama which made it difficult to find time aside from weekends to work. Starting in the fall was also problematic for some projects (e.g. identifying and mapping plants for pollinators) because the bulk of their time together ended up in the winter. All were positive about working in intergenerational partnerships. Some teens would have liked to have another teen with them also.

Did you match most of the teens and adults, or did they usually sign up together as teams? If the former, what guidelines did you have for making matches?

Teams are formed in both ways: (1) some teams may apply together, and (2) some teams we match up before the program. Most often we match up our teams rather than the former. To match a teen with an adult, we ask a series of questions on our online application. Below is a description taken from our application:

Before attending the CTP workshop, we will pair you with a teammate. Teams will consist of one teen and one adult. The goal is for each team to carry out a service-learning conservation project together after the CTP workshop. We will take into account the following to help determine teams: (1) where you live, (2) your interests and (3) your time availability. To help us match participants, please respond to the following questions:

Hi Brian,

Just to make sure you saw, my colleague, Cary, responded below about the mapping programs we use. Thanks for your question!

Hi Betsy,

Thanks for sharing! Your project sounds very much like a sister project that we are all working on at UConn called Teacher Professional Learning or TPL http://nrca.uconn.edu/teachers/index.htm. TPL is a 3-day workshop for high school science teachers to learn and integrate geospatial technologies in an NGSS-aligned environmental science unit. The difference from Conservation Training Partnerships (CTP) is that CTP is an informal science project that pairs high school students with adults in the community (not necessarily teachers) to work on authentic conservation projects. I'll take a look at the trip journal app. This is definitely something we might want to include in TPL.

Thanks back to you for also sharing and thinking about the structure of engagement through digital tools.

We also are engaging the interior environment in collaboration with USGreen Building Council and as development of a toolkit extension to the NASA/AREN project's patented flying platform.   These programs literally span across all options for phenomenon discussion and we will be writing more to explain that as someone has posed a question on evaluation.  What you see in the video is the first stages where the experience is equally accessed...the classroom.  USGBC has great new support activities and certification that teachers used to see their classroom as a STEM lab.   See http://stemforall2018.videohall.com/presentatio...

Hi Sarah, thank you for your comment. Yes, my collegaues, Cary Chadwick and Dave Dickson (our geospatial instructors), vetted 25+ apps before deciding on free/low cost and effective mapping apps to use for this program. The same with our teacher program that Laura R. mentioned above. For recruitment of participants, we have a network of 1000+ teachers  and youth program leaders we reach out to and work with throughout the state of Connecticut to share this program with their students. We also make in-school and organization presentations. For our adult participants, we work with CT Land Trusts, Wetland/Conservation Commissions, River Alliance, and many other community/conservation organizations. This year we are able to accommodate 100 participants (50 adults, 50 teens) at 4 workshops held throughout the state, allowing us to make this opportunity open to almost everyone that applies and expresses a geniune interest.

Thanks Angela!  Your work, especially at AERA co-presenting with young people, is a testament to possibilities associated with positioning young people as experts. We are digging into our data from Year 1 to explicitly think about the affordances and constraints inherent in intergenerational learning and ways in which we can productively press against cultural and historical norms related youth and adult interactions that are more horizontal in terms of positioning and learning. What are some ways you might have identified that support adults in considering positioning, both for themselves and for young learners they are participating with?

We adopted/adapted the following norms/commitments from your group's work and shared with participants in Year 1, but we are realizing that just saying these things is not enough, so we are thinking of more ways we can position participants more horizontally in our work with adult and teen partners:

Collaborative Team Partnerships Norms for Project Work. These norms are designed to ensure that both adult and teen project members are recognized as essential team members with unique existing resources (knowledge, ideas, and ways of solving problems) that are important for accomplishing project team pursuits.  If adopted, we believe these norms will support equitable learning experiences for all involved.

1. Actively listen to and think about each team member’s ideas and different ways of making sense of the world that they have developed through their life experiences and interactions with others in their community. Make a concerted effort to hear and consider the voice of others.
2. Actively support all team members in using their ideas, capabilities (e.g., technological), different ways of making sense of the world, and different experiences as resources resolving community-based concerns or problems. Commit to supporting others in using their resources in project work.
3. Recognize that each team member’s ideas, capabilities, and problem solving strategies are always developing and need to be made public and collaboratively refined to support individual and group learning. Consider how the group’s project work can be enhanced overtime through the application and refinement of the group's diverse sets of ideas and sensemaking practices.
4. Recognize how each team member’s community histories, values, and knowledge building practices have and continue to contribute to scientific understanding and problem solving. Recognize how unique backgrounds and perspectives can serve as sources of innovation and creativity in problem solving.

*Modified from Bang, Brown, Calabrese Barton, Rosebery & Warren, (in press).