Outcomes and lessons learned from a partnership with East Tennessee Freedom Schools to involve K-12 students in authentic microbial ecology research

Geoscience and environmental science are among the least racially diverse branches of science. As early participation in science encourages long-term participation in science, so our project seeks to involve high school students in authentic scientific research. Here, we present qualitative findings and reflections from a partnership with the East Tennessee Freedom Schools (ETFS). The seven-week-long program was designed as an introduction to aquatic environmental microbiology aimed at high school students in Knox and Blount Counties in Tennessee. Activities and goals were crafted with input from the director of the Freedom Schools with the targeted age groups in mind; however, efforts to recruit students from area high schools were largely unsuccessful, so we partnered with a class of middle school ETFS scholarsl. Recruitment was hampered by student burnout associated with the pandemic. Our experience with exclusively middle-school aged students during the summer 2021 Freedom School taught us that early hands-on background building is crucial to facilitate sustained engagement required for learning through in-depth experiments. Additional identified challenges were the importance of connecting content, findings, and implications to the students everyday lives and providing immersive experiences that facilitate creativity and scientific inquiry. In the future, we aim to develop deeper connections between the content and the students lives to promote interest and buy-in from the participants. An additional emergent goal is the generation of data that informs local environmental policy decisions.