Community ethnography uses research methods such as observations, interviews, and surveys to learn more about one’s community members, their wants, and their needs (Adler and Adler 1998). Students can use community ethnography to deeply engage in the engineering practices of asking questions and defining problems outlined in the Next Generation Science Standards, and constructing explanations and designing solutions, thus optimizing their solutions when responding to community wants and needs. Just as important, students can use community ethnography to leverage the various forms of expertise held by people in their community as they draw on engineering practices to help make their communities a more just place to be.

Integrating community ethnography supports more equity- oriented science teaching by supporting students in learning with and for their community. To effectively engage in these practices, students ask questions, gather and analyze information to determine specific challenges to address and define the dimensions of a problem. An example of this is when students made observations of a local corner store; interviewed family members about their favorite dishes; and designed nutritionally-sound, appetizing, and economical meals in their sixth-grade classroom. Throughout this process, students were able to develop and use new expertise about nutrition, metabolic processes and their community’s cooking histories (Calabrese Barton and Tan 2009).

Community Ethnography as Pedagogy involves:

1. A stance that community knowledge is a valuable part of disciplinary knowing and necessary for effectively engaging in the practices of defining problems and designing solutions. This is the starting motivation for supporting students using community ethnography.

2. Pedagogical moves that support multiple forms of, and purposes for, interactions and interactional spaces for students, teachers, and community members and that help teachers notice, value, and respond to students’ cultural knowledge/practice as important forms of epistemic authority.

3.Tools that position students and teachers as co-learners of community concerns and their intersections with disciplinary knowing and classroom activity. The main tools we have used in our classroom have been making participant observations, administering surveys, and conducting interviews. These tools support students in defining problems by soliciting information from their community and designing and optimizing their designs by gathering more community feedback. Teachers and students can collaboratively decide which aspects of their communities are most salient to their investigation and focus on using their ethnographic tools with those community members who are experts about those areas (see Table 1).

Teachers can plan to use community ethnography in multiple forms throughout a unit. Students can use community ethnography tools in formal ways by designing/administering surveys or interviewing others during a formal feedback cycle. Students can also engage in community ethnography in more informal ways by using ethnographic tools as needed throughout the engineering design cycle. We recommend that teachers plan for both informal and formal community ethnography opportunities. These approaches help students make decisions in a systematic way throughout the engineering design cycle. The 5E lesson example highlights how community ethnography was incorporated to support creating a solution to a problem.

When introducing community ethnography, ask students to explore why including other people’s perspectives matters in engineering. Teachers can do this by talking about engineering projects in their community and why community voices have mattered to the projects. Additionally, ask students to brainstorm which community stakeholders should be included in the engineering process. Incorporating multiple community stakeholders supports students in balancing trade-offs and designing engineering solutions that are not detrimental to the broader community (Gunckel and Tolbert 2018). It is also important because it teaches students that engineering design should center the needs of the people for whom designs are intended.

A first step to plan for community ethnography in a unit is for teachers to ask, “How does this unit connect to my students and their community’s lives?” and “In what ways might students use their new science knowledge and practices with other forms of expertise, with their community during this unit?” Generate a list of answers to these ideas. Then, teachers can look across the lessons in the unit and incorporate formal opportunities for community ethnography. We also recommend asking students for ideas because they are experts about their own lives.

Additionally, plan and develop procedures in the class community to support students in engaging in informal community ethnography when they decide they need to leverage it as a tool. For example, consistently ask students to share participant observations when they brainstorm ideas, or if students request feedback on their design solutions, ask: “Who else could you talk to for more ideas?” Teachers can display anchor charts with these and other prompting questions to support themselves and their students when engaging in community ethnography to better define problems and design solutions.

In the following sections, we outline how to use the three community ethnography tools. These tools have been used in in-school and out-of-school contexts across multiple units (Calabrese Barton and Tan 2010). These tools can be flexibly adapted in both engineering and science-based units. We share examples of how we used these tools in middle grades science classes during an energy engineering unit focused on making classrooms more sustainable.

Ms. B. taught a unit focused on designing ways to investigate and eradicate invasive plant species, focused on the driving question, “How can we help our community stop the spread of invasive plant species, and why should we care?” Throughout the unit, students cycled through three iterations of the 5E model. Below we focus on the second 5E cycle where students designed and conducted an investigation into the biodiversity of their local neighborhood ecosystem and garlic mustard’s—the invasive plant under study—impact on it.

Prior to the multiday lesson described below, students were introduced to the unit goal of helping their community stop the spread of invasive garlic mustard. Additionally, they observed the structure and function of garlic mustard to build explanations for how plants reproduce and spread.

The challenge in this lesson was to develop an approach to safely harvesting garlic mustard, which meant reviewing how to identify garlic mustard based on structures, setting criteria for successful harvesting (e.g., get all of the roots, not dropping seeds), developing an approach for harvesting (by practicing harvesting dandelions in their schoolyard without leaving roots and seeds), and creating identification and harvesting guides to use around the school neighborhood using a “biocube” approach (Smithsonian National Museum of History, n.d.). Having students explore the biodiversity of their schoolyard is a powerful way for them to design ways to learn about ecosystems (Harris et al. 2013). Students were supported in developing explanations of the impact of garlic mustard on biodiversity and approaches to supporting biodiversity. Throughout this lesson, the students used the community ethnography tools of participant observations and interviews with members of their classroom and local communities to meet the lesson goal.

The teacher engaged her students in three related activities. First, her students tested their systems using fair tests based on their criteria, and then developed explanations for how their systems worked, including ideas for improvements. For example, students in Ms. B’s class came up with a three criteria: Able to harvest all of the plants Did not spread seeds Will not let a plant grow out of the roots

Second, students developed and agreed upon additional criteria for analyzing the impact of garlic mustard on their school neighborhood ecosystem using the biocube approach. These criteria include documenting: Harvest location Number of garlic mustard plants present Number of different organisms present

Third, the teacher supported students in developing initial explanations for how and why garlic mustard may impact their school neighborhood biodiversity.

The teacher engaged her whole class in devising a plan to use their garlic mustard harvesting guide in their schoolyard. First, they developed a plan for safely harvesting garlic mustard. Second, in teams, they harvested the garlic mustard and generated data on biodiversity in the process.

A whole-class discussion was held to develop an explanation for school leadership about the impact of garlic mustard on the school neighborhood. Additionally, the class devised a take-home garlic mustard kit (a garlic mustard harvesting guide and a trash bag for safe disposal). The teacher prompted students to explain their choices based on evidence from their participant observations, interviews, and garlic mustard harvesting data.

MS-LS2-5 Ecosystems: Interactions, Energy, and Dynamics

Evaluate competing design solutions for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Students should be supported in thinking about who should be surveyed. Teachers can ask students: What communities are we most interested in and why? Which community members’ ideas matter most to our investigation? Who is most affected by the problems and solutions being designed? Students should first practice administering the surveys to each other before reaching beyond their classroom community. Teachers can support students in making sure they understand and can explain the questions to younger responders when they administer the surveys. Teachers should invite students to explain the survey questions in their own words. This facilitates smoother survey analysis as well as supports the students in better understanding the problems they are defining. Teachers can organize survey sessions or have students make plans to administer the surveys outside of class time. Students should only administer the survey to people they know or under supervision by an adult. Additionally, teachers can share the survey through social media or email to gather additional responses.

After administering the surveys, students analyze their data. This is an important aspect of obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information practice. It is helpful to separate the responses from different community members (e.g., students, adults) to support students in understanding patterns in different groups’ views. Students can use graphic organizers to analyze how many people chose each response and patterns in who selected/shared what. The organizers can support students in predicting the reasons for the responses and how to apply insights from the responses to their engineering work (see Online Supplemental Materials for a survey analysis graphic organizer).

For example, in the energy engineering unit, Mrs. B’s class reviewed a survey they planned to administer to better understand the sustainability issues that mattered most to their community. They made participant observations before administering the survey and after analyzing it. Mrs. B purposefully had students contribute to the survey design because their expertise as community members mattered. The students added and deleted questions. Then as a class, they decided systematically who they should survey based on who would be affected most by their eventual design solutions and who had expertise that would support their efforts. After the sixth graders took the survey themselves, they chose to survey a fifth-grade class because they were impacted by similar classroom sustainability issues as the sixth graders. Sixth graders also administered the survey to other community members, including Mrs. B, the school custodian, the administrative assistant, and the student services officer. Mrs. B actively encouraged students to find more survey participants because she valued the students’ expertise on whose input mattered.

Next, students analyzed what problems mattered most to different community member categories (students, teachers, staff). The students also analyzed the qualitative data by looking for patterns in proposed solutions to sustainability challenges impacting their school community. The students then decided on the problems they wanted to address with their energy engineering designs such as low morale, school bullying, lack of fun, and energy wasting.