Climate Stories: A Community and Planetarium Partnership Model to Develop Local Data-Driven Visual Impact Narratives

Informal learning environments like planetariums play a critical role in educating the public on climate change. Local stories motivate more than abstract global threats when it comes to understanding the science of climate change and how communities can enact resilience efforts. Climate change disproportionately affects marginalized and under-resourced communities, as they are most at risk from disruptions in water and food supply, more likely to live in homes with inadequate insulation or cooling, and more likely to live in areas with old and poorly-maintained infrastructure, among other challenges, so it is important for climate change stories to represent the local and social dimensions of climate change. Indigenous communities are at particular risk from climate change, but also have rich cultural stories about how people engage with nature to draw upon. This project will develop a model for how planetariums can collaborate with local communities to co-develop local stories, supported by data-driven immersive visualizations, of the impacts of climate change on their community, connecting the community's culture and localized impacts and mitigation efforts with the larger story and science of climate change. This model will be presented in the form of a collaboration guide and evaluation toolkit that other planetariums and informal science education institutions can use to develop their own localized climate data stories. There are around 800 planetariums in the United States, and 2,000 worldwide, so this work has the potential to impact hundreds of thousands of planetarium visitors annually as well as similarly large numbers of audiences in relevant local community settings.

The project uses a collection of frameworks that support collaboration between Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Western science, provide guidelines for responsible research practice with Indigenous community partners, and offer practical strategies for how to engage communities equitably with climate knowledge and resilience efforts. A needs assessment will be conducted via survey administered to planetariums across the United States to ascertain their interest and ability in working with climate change content and local communities, to inform expectations about inputs for project design for the collaboration guide. The development of the collaboration model will use a two-phase design: initially, four "Development Partnerships" will articulate, test and refine the collaboration model and create a collaboration guide and toolkit which five additional "Implementation Partnerships?" will subsequently test for applicability. The guiding research questions are: (1) How healthy and productive are the local collaborations? (2) Comparing results across nine collaborations, which elements hypothesized to support a healthy collaboration between planetariums and community partners are most salient or significant? and (3) To what degree do local climate impact stories impact audiences, and what role do visualizations and narratives play in creating audience impact? Data to be collected include surveys, interviews, and focus groups. The iterative data analysis method used by Risien et al. (2023) will be used to derive basic principles for respectful and productive collaborations. An iterative, local capacity-building approach will be used to co-create and refine templates for audience questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups, which after validation, will be distributed with the guide for planetariums to use to assess the STEM education impact of their data story co-design efforts.