Involving REU interns in community-based research in southern Louisiana - Lessons learned from a summer on the Bayou
Abstract
Many students from under-represented communities choose not to pursue graduate school in geoscience in part because they see few immediate and concrete opportunities to serve society by doing so. To address this, RESESS and SOARS, two long-standing undergraduate-to-graduate geoscience research internships, offer interested students the opportunity work with local and indigenous communities to design and conduct research with clear societal relevance . Our presentation will describe one such community-based research project in coastal areas of Louisiana. This summer, RESESS and SOARS worked with the Center for Hazards Assessment, Response and Technology (CHART) at the University of New Orleans to introduce our interns to projects that support community viability in the face of current and historical ecosystem change by integrating physical science, geospatial technology and traditional ecological knowledge. For nine weeks, three interns lived and worked in Louisiana coastal communities and learned how projects can be defined by, guided by and assessed against community priorities. CHART introduced our interns to participatory action research (PAR) and helped them apply PAR to their research. The interns developed and implemented community-based research projects around land-loss, ecology of culturally important plants, and water quality. The experience has earned positive informal feedback from the students and the communities they worked with and we have already learned valuable lessons about doing community-based work. After the completion of the summer program, student and mentor experiences will be assessed formally through surveys and interviews. Our presentation will describe the projects our three interns worked on, lessons-learned by the interns and our programs, and share recommendations for a successful off-site summer experience for other programs considering community-based research.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2012
- Bibcode:
- 2012AGUFMED41F..02H
- Keywords:
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- 0855 EDUCATION / Diversity