The Practice
Aerosols in School is a community engaged learning project that supports postgraduates in the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Aerosol Science to apply their research skills in service of the “real world” concerns of a local community. Postgraduates (PGRs) work directly with school children to co-create approaches to studying air quality in the pupils’ community, with expert facilitation provided by an engaged arts practitioner.
The Aerosol Science CDT is the first centre of its kind to offer foundational training for PGRs in the interdisciplinary field of aerosol science. The CDT admits ~20 PGRs each year from diverse disciplinary backgrounds spanning the physical sciences, engineering, medical and life sciences, environmental science, and pharmacy. As part of their first-year taught units, PGRs learn to take and analyse air quality measurements at locations around Bristol. The motivation behind the Aerosols in School project was to give PGRs the opportunity to apply these data collection and analysis skills in the context of a real community, facilitating the co-creation of knowledge between PGRs and local school children and giving CDT students an insight into the broader societal impact of their research.
St Werburghs Primary School in Bristol is sandwiched between a main railway line, a gas works, a busy A-road into the city and the M32 motorway (Fig. 1). Pupils and families at St Werburghs are increasingly concerned about the air quality issues around their school and community, and recently staged a protest (Woolerton 2023) to raise drivers’ awareness on the impact idling vehicle emissions cause to the children’s health. In the Aerosols in School project, CDT PGRs worked with St Werburghs Primary’s “Green Team” after school club to explore the nature of air quality issues in the neighbourhood, with PGRs acting as “research assistants” for the school pupils, gathering data to address co-created air quality research questions.
Figure 1. Location of St Werburghs Primary School showing proximity to the M32 motorway, railway line, and gas works. A busy A-road runs directly in front of the school.
The Aerosols in School project methodology draws on Citizen Science, Engaged Learning and arts-based methodologies to offer a unique experience for both PGRs and school children to explore air quality issues in context, with expert facilitation provided by an engaged arts practitioner. Our artist facilitator, Morgan Tipping, has extensive experience of facilitating projects that explore social relationships and challenge power imbalances. The art-based methodology we are using puts co-creation at its heart – our PGRs are co-creating the project with us, and are in turn, co-creating approaches to studying air quality with the children of St Werburghs.
‘Co-creation’ is used to refer to a diverse collection of approaches applied in a wide range of contexts: from social research, to design, to teaching and learning (Ramaswamy 2018; UCL; Voorberg 2014), with often contested and contestable meanings implied by each approach/application (e.g., see also social innovation & co-production). However, a unifying theme underpinning all contexts can be framed (Voorberg et. al.) as “the active involvement of end-users in various stages of the production process”, whatever the process might be producing. It is difficult to gather conclusive data regarding the effective outcomes of co-creation processes more broadly, as Voorberg et. al. found in their systematic review, noting that co-creation is often viewed as a “virtue in itself”. However, in a pedagogical context, Dollinger & Lodge’s 2019 case studies of co-creation in higher education, found that co-creative approaches produced participant perceived benefits including “increased student employability, self-efficacy and confidence, and student ownership and engagement”.
Recent studies have explored the use of arts-based approaches to research, finding that they helped elicit “rich and meaningful data with seldom-heard groups” (Nathan 2023) and “offers ways of knowing the world that involve sensory perceptions and emotion as well as intellectual responses” (Greenwood 2019). The 2023 UN Global Pulse Report “The Most Creative Look to the Future” stated that art and creative practice are fundamental to transformational innovation on a global scale. Reflecting our own ambitions with this project, Ammentorp (2007) explores the use of arts-based pedagogies as a vehicle for social consciousness, drawing on Vygostsky’s ideas on art, emotion, and society. As far as we know, we are unusual in applying this in a research training context.
The Aerosols in School project
The St Werburghs Green Team pupils (aged 7 – 11, approximately 15 children) meet every week for 30-minutes after school. The project launched with an interactive ‘What is Aerosol Science?’ session delivered to the Green Team by CDT Course Director Rachael Miles and community arts practitioner Morgan Tipping, in which pupils explored what aerosols are, where they come from, what they look like, how big they are, and why aerosol scientists are interested in measuring air quality. The session was interactive, engaging pupils in predictive matching games (e.g., which aerosol picture goes with which source), introducing a 3D model of ‘Larry the Lung’, and debating the question ‘What is the similarity between a piece of broccoli and your lungs?’. [Answer: the branching structure].
In the next phase of the project, led by Morgan Tipping, Green Team pupils drew and annotated fabric maps of the local area with their personal connections, memories, feelings and special places, a process known as “psychogeographic mapping” (Fig. 2).
Figure 2. Images of psychogeographic maps produced by Green Team pupils.
During a training day held at the Bristol Children’s Scrapstore, groups of CDT PGRs independently explored different parts of the St Werburghs neighbourhood and created their own psychogeographic fabric maps based on their impressions of the area, including the aerosol sources they thought might be present within the community. CDT PGRs then combined their maps with those produced by the children, with each group of PGRs creating icons of aerosol sources they had identified in the community using art and craft materials (Fig. 3).
Figure 3. Psychogeographic map produced by a PGR (top left); PGRs working on aerosol icons (top right); aerosol icon examples (bottom left); PGRs adding their maps and icons to the Green Team pupil maps (bottom right).
In the third phase of the project, volunteers from each of the PGR teams attended two Green Team after school sessions, working with the pupils to identify research questions about the air quality in the neighbourhood that they could answer through testing, using the shared maps to anchor their conversations. The PGR teams then visited St Werburghs at different times of day with Airbeam monitors to take air quality measurements in the areas they had identified with the pupils during the mapping process. PGRs recorded data showing elevated levels of aerosol resulting from burning bonfires on nearby allotments, as well as the impact of rush hour traffic on local air quality. PGRs took the results of their measurements back to the Green Team for a final session to discuss their findings with the pupils in an accessible way.
In the final phase of the project, Morgan Tipping hosted ‘Pollution Monsters” workshops for St Werburghs pupils and their families at Bristol Children’s Scrapstore, where participants explored the air quality findings, and made creative responses to them using scrap and art materials. Morgan created a set of costumes responding to the findings that will be gifted to the children of St Werburghs Primary for them to use in communicating their concerns about air quality in the neighbourhood (Fig. 4).
Figure 4. Costumes created by Morgan Tipping inspired by the project findings on local air quality.
The Impact
Feedback from our PGRs indicates that they find these approaches enjoyable – “I enjoyed creating tools to demonstrate to the children – it allowed me to think outside the box on how to explain and show complex concepts in a fun and engaging way”. PGR comments to the CDT External Examiner regarding the Aerosols in School project were also highly favourable, with PGRs requesting more opportunities to contextualise their research through public engagement.
PGR reflections indicate that they are developing consciousness of the intersubjective experiences of place as linked to air quality that we had intended. The co-creative, arts-led process enabled the students to understand the data they were gathering in the context of the community it was affecting. As one student reflected “they see this place really differently to us because it is their neighbourhood”. Even though the purpose of the project was not to “teach” the children at St Werburghs about aerosols, by being involved in the project, we found that they learned a lot about what aerosols are and where they might find them in their community. In our family workshops it was great to see Green Team children explaining the findings to their parents without the need for the scientists to step in.
The project gave the PGRs and staff involved an opportunity to make meaningful connections with children in the community and their families. Parents in our family workshops were really interested in the project and its findings and offered further ideas for testing that could be done to help them understand how to live well with the air quality issues in their neighbourhood, with one parent suggesting school run monitoring to help parents understand which routes to school to take. St Werburghs school were also very pleased with the project, inviting the project lead to talk about it at a meeting with a representative of UNICEF as part of the school’s assessment for their Gold Rights Respecting School award.
Next Steps
The project is being developed as a Zine which will be shared with the Green Team pupils and the CDT PGRs. The St Werburghs Primary Green Team are keen to continue working with the Aerosol Science CDT and would like to connect with next year’s first year students, share what they learned, and take an active role in shaping how the PGRs learn about air quality in context.
Contact
For more information, please contact Lecturer in Responsible Innovation and project lead, Vivienne Kuh, (Vivienne.Kuh@bristol.ac.uk), or Aerosol Science CDT Course Director, Rachael Miles (Rachael.Miles@bristol.ac.uk).
References
Ammentorp, L. (2007). Imagining social change: Developing social consciousness in an arts-based pedagogy. Outlines. Critical Practice Studies, 9:1, 38–52.
Dollinger, M. & Lodge, J. (2019). Student-staff co-creation in higher education: an evidence-informed model to support future design and implementation Journal of Higher Education Policy & Management 42:5, 532-546
Greenwood, J. (2019, February 25). Arts-Based Research. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.29.
Nathan S, Hodgins M, Wirth J, Ramirez J, Walker N, & Cullen P. (2023). The use of arts-based methodologies and methods with young people with complex psychosocial needs: a systematic narrative review. Health Expect.; 26: 795-805.
Ramaswamy, V & Ozcan, K. (2018). What is co-creation? An interactional creation framework and its implications for value creation, Journal of Business Research, 84, 196-205.
UCL What we mean by co-creation. Retrieved 1 Mar. 2024, from https://www.ucl.ac.uk/changemakers/what-we-mean-co-creation
UN Global Pulse (2023). The Most Creative Look to the Future: Imagination and Creative Practice in the Service of Organizational Transformation. Retrieved 1 Mar. 2024, from https://www.unglobalpulse.org/document/the-most-creative-look-to-the-future-imagination-and-creative-practice-in-service-of-organizational-transformation/
Voorberg, W. H. Bekkers, V. J. J. M. & Tummers, L. G. (2015) A Systematic Review of Co-Creation and Co-Production: Embarking on the social innovation journey, Public Management Review, 17:9, 1333-1357
Woolerton, B (2023), School children stage protest against idling divers, Bristol 247, accessed 19th August 2024 < https://www.bristol247.com/news-and-features/news/schoolchildren-stage-protest-against-idling-drivers/>.
