In 2017, in putting together our application to the Publications Committee for the positions of Co-Editors in Chief, we (Melville, Verma, and Campbell) set out the key priorities that we wanted to ...

It is crucial to support students in better understanding water and sustainability issues because water plays a vital role in maintaining global ecosystems, including human life. A wide range of cu...

It has been over two years since the world came to a shuddering halt due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through this time people have confronted the uncertainties and stresses created by th...

High Leverage Practices (HLPs), as a core set of teaching practices, represent important instructional priorities and provide instructional guidance for students’ engagement in practice-based instruction. The goals of this research were to 1) understand how an epistemic community (the people designing and leading courses and programs) viewed the HLP creation process, 2) understand the processes through which the epistemic community actually engaged in the refinement of the HLPS, and 3) identify and present the HLPs created. Data collected across the 2019-2020 academic year included interviews with seven instructors and seven students and four observations of the integration team meetings. First, thematic analysis revealed that the epistemic community members considered the process of creating and refining HLPs central to improving the quality of their instruction. Second, the processes through which the community engaged in HLP refinement included connecting experience and feedback with educational research, identifying the purpose of instructional strategies, sharing practices for instruction, and creating a model for course expansion. Third, the HLPs produced included: 1) eliciting students’ initial ideas, 2) informing approaches to problems, and 3) developing informed solutions to address community environmental challenges. This work informs in the literature, especially in applied STEM education, about HLP creation in the context of an epistemic community.

Background: Environmental sustainability-focused service learning programs can aid communities in addressing environmental problems and provide students with hands-on training. Understanding the implementation of such programs can inform research and application. Purpose: We investigate the implementation of an environmental sustainability-focused service learning program at a large New England public university. Our inquiry sought to better understand epistemic communities by addressing the research question: What conditions, including contextual factors and resources (funding, university context) and people (i.e. faculty, their orientation to teaching, how they work together), supported the establishment of an epistemic community in the implementation of E-Corps? Methodology/Approach: We employ frameworks of 1) Design Based Implementation Research (DBIR), which considers problems from multiple stakeholders’ perspectives, collaborative design, pedagogical theory and knowledge, and capacity for sustaining change, and 2) epistemic communities—the stakeholders recursively generating, using, and refining pedagogical knowledge. We thematically analyzed interviews with students (n=7), two rounds of interviews with faculty (n=7), and participant observations of four E-Corp team meetings (n=13). Findings/Conclusions: Findings show that epistemic community within E-Corps’ implementation was supported by 1) an existing context of resources within the university, and 2) a robust university-partnership prioritizing community benefits with aligned instructor approaches. Our work informs both research on DBIR and epistemic communities as well as the practical implementation of university-community environmental partnerships.