Ph.D. student Jadda Miller has received two recognitions for her work at the intersection of environmental education and community-based approaches to scientific research. She has been named a 2024-2025 Earth Scholar by the UC Davis Institute of the Environment and, with her advisor Prof. Heidi Ballard, has accepted a 2024-2025 Public Impact Research Initiative (PIRI) grant from the UC Davis Office of Public Scholarship and Engagement. 

The Earth Scholar fellowship and PIRI grant will allow Miller to implement the project “Hoʻomalu ʻĀina Maui” (Protecting the Land of Maui), a name given to it by the study’s participants. This project is a community science approach to land stewardship for wildfire mitigation in Maui, Hawai’i. Miller collaboratively designed it with the Kihei Charter School and nonprofit Kipuka Olowalu to empower high school field ecology students to mitigate wildfire impacts through landscape assessments and the cultivation of native, fire-resistant plant species. The project will also support students to increase their understanding of traditional Hawaiian land stewardship practices.

“Young people are so thoughtful, and they think critically about environmental and social issues impacting their community,” Miller said. “There’s so much older generations can learn from them.”

Participatory Science Can Inspire Climate Resilience

Miller has had an interest in community-based research since she served as a food security and agriculture volunteer for Peace Corps Nepal. But she strengthened her passion for it while working as a science teacher and researcher at Kihei Charter School. There she was encouraged to implement project-based learning that inspired young people to participate in their community. To engage her students in educational programming around environment studies, Miller reached out to Mauna Kahālāwai Watershed Partnership, Kipuka Olowalu’s sister organization, to learn how her class could support the nonprofit’s work preserving a Native Hawaiian cultural site in the Olowalu Valley. As a result, her students helped to remove invasive plant species and learn more about the local environment and culture.

Miller’s dissertation research now builds on the curriculum she originally taught at Kihei Charter School. Thinking more broadly about climate change and the anxiety that young people feel toward the future, she and her teacher collaborator Cassie Kepler decided to conduct research on the ways that place-based learning can lead to greater optimism, resilience, and action in students. Inspired by her dissertation advisors’ work, Miller decided to extend the project’s definition of “resilience” beyond self-efficacy to social-ecological resilience: resilience that a person builds by cultivating a climate-responsive natural environment and community. This approach has been shaped by Miller’s work at the Center for Community and Citizen Science, where science initiatives are centrally focused on and within communities. “It can be overwhelming to think about the impact of climate change on a global scale,” said Miller. “But when you think on a local scale, it becomes tangible and achievable to make a difference.”

To measure participants’ personal and social-ecological resilience, Miller will monitor her students’ participation in activities related to identifying and removing invasive plants and growing more native and fire-resistant species. Her hope is that these kinds of hands-on activities will influence the students’ connection to their home and Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) culture, as well as strengthen their sense of agency as participants and researchers in environmental science.

Putting Community First

Even before starting her research study, Miller recognized that the students were committed to preserving their community. During preliminary interviews, many of them shared that they were deeply affected by the wildfires that devastated Lahaina, Maui in 2023. This experience transformed the abstract realities of climate change into a direct threat for the students, and it left them with a desire to take part in something bigger that reduces the impact of climate-related disasters on Maui.

The Kihei Charter School students have embraced the opportunity to participate in Miller’s study and build collective momentum around local land stewardship. Most notably, one eleventh grader approached Miller and Kepler about getting more involved in the monitoring of native plant growth in the area. Miller connected the student with the local ecologist who is supporting the development of the project’s vegetation assessment protocols. The eleventh grader is now teaching other students how to monitor the vegetation at Kipuka Olowalu and measure where invasive species grow. “She’s amazing,” said Miller. “I keep forgetting that she’s only sixteen.”

No matter what actions the students take through her study, Miller hopes that they will learn that camaraderie and collaboration are the roots of sustainable change. “The more you can co-create work, the more it serves the needs of a particular community,” she said. This is also a guiding mission in Miller’s own work. As an academic, she’s aware of the power dynamics researchers can impose on communities when they carry out studies that aren’t informed by local stakeholders. To ensure that her research is grounded in participant experiences, Miller strives to give power back to any community she works with. “I try to keep an open mind and avoid coming with an agenda,” she said. “You have to constantly make sure your research is serving the people you’re working with — and that it’s going to support them in the long term, too.”

Read the original article at UC Davis School of Education News