Arts-Based Knowledge Sharing Among Rural Communities and Informal Science Educators to Address Wildfire Risks

People in rural areas, including those in agricultural communities, face disproportionately high risks associated with wildfire hazards. Educational approaches that more fully consider their perspectives and goals are needed to mitigate these risks. Accordingly, this project will build partnerships among rural community organizations, a small science center, and a university, with the purpose of understanding diverse perspectives on wildfire. These perspectives will be used to develop informal science learning resources and programming that better prepare a broad range of audiences to understand multiple facets of wildfire and to mitigate their associated risks. These perspectives will also inform the creation of research questions and a corresponding research design that can be used to explore whether the informal learning experiences are meeting community-defined learning goals. The project team will establish an advisory board, representative of diverse groups affected by wildfire, that will guide these efforts. To facilitate dialogue across different audiences, the project team will organize a public, participatory art installation in which different groups (e.g., rural families, wildfire frontliners, informal educators, artists, scientists, recreational land users, and agricultural workers) will share their experiences with and understandings of wildfire. Ultimately, this project will result in a plan for developing and researching informal educational resources related to wildfire, as informed by numerous relevant and diverse perspectives, which have the potential to benefit society by mitigating risks associated with wildfire.

This project will result in a plan for the development of informal science learning resources that will build public scientific literacy about wildfire. These materials will foster systems thinking about the complex causes and results of wildfire. They will also foster data literacy through supporting the interpretation of spatial and numerical data, such as burn risk maps, fire perimeter maps, wind patterns, or evacuation routes. To elicit relevant perspectives on wildfire, which will form the basis of these informal learning resources, the project team will engage different audiences in eight arts-based community knowledge-building workshops. These audiences may include youth and families from rural communities impacted by wildfires, Indigenous people with historical knowledge of wildfire stewardship, migrant farmworkers, wildfire frontliners, scientists who study wildfire, and artists whose work addresses wildfire, among others. The project team will conduct ethnographic interviews with sixteen people who reflect diversity in age, experience, expertise, gender, race, or ethnicity, to further inform their plans for the development and evaluation of informal learning resources related to wildfire. This project will result in community-informed educational resources and a corresponding research trajectory. This project will also result in an innovative plan for the co-design of informal science learning resources, which can serve as a model for other small and mid-sized science centers that seek to provide locally-relevant and responsive programming in the context of community partnerships.