This dissertation introduces the concept of environmental science identity (ESI) as a way to help better understand and support learners’ engagement with the complex, global problems we face today, which require solutions from multiple perspectives. Because examining a learner’s identity incorporates their values, culture, history, and future, using the lens of ESI in environmental and science education enables educators to honor learners’ knowledge and skills in culturally sustaining and meaningful ways. I additionally argue that we must look expansively at learning activities with a learning ecosystem framework to understand the full picture of how ESI is developed. With these two lenses, ESI and the learning ecosystems framework, I examined the relationship between youth development of ESI and their learning ecosystems, as well as how youth learning ecosystems may be resilient in the face of systemic disturbances like the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-22. In Chapter 2 I argue that zoos and aquariums need to bring to bear the extensive theory and research on the construct of identity, particularly ESI, and consider the learning ecosystems in which they are embedded, in order to meet their missions of environmental conservation and inclusion. Chapter 3 is an empirical study of how environmental science learning ecosystems support ESI development, as well as the related but distinct construct of environmental identity, in middle and high school youth in urban settings. Through analysis of interviews I found that large ecosystems or deep engagement in activities were more likely to support ESI and environmental identity development. I also found that key material and social resources for identity development were unequally distributed across contexts for learning. Chapter 4 is a mixed-methods investigation of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on environmental science learning ecosystems. Through quantitative analysis of a retrospective pre- and during-pandemic survey of the frequency of learning activities, and semi-structured interviews with selected youth, I found that youth increased their engagement in activities overall with significant increases in gardening, hiking or camping, and noticing the plants and animals around them. Despite fewer activities available overall, these youth deepened their engagement in activities that interested them that were still available during the COVID-19-related shutdowns, illustrating the resilience of young people and ways in which the natural world provided science engagement amidst the stresses of the pandemic.

This dissertation investigates learning and literacy as drivers of socioecological transformation, focusing specifically on the context of community-based watershed monitoring. Community-based monitoring is a form of citizen science, in which professional scientists and broader publics jointly engage in research or monitoring. Community-based monitoring is distinguished from other types of citizen science in that it is typically place-based and oriented toward local decision-making. The focal monitoring projects that this dissertation examines are situated within the specific context of dam removal and river restoration initiatives in Southern California and Western Montana, each of which carries the goal of increasing habitat connectivity to support threatened and endangered trout species, as well as overall watershed health. Addressing environmental problems - like the presence of obsolete dams - requires the collaboration of multiple groups wherein they collectively learn with and from each other to co-produce shared knowledge. This requires attention to issues of power, status, and rank, given the ways in which dominant science is typically privileged in environmental decision-making despite the robust forms of local knowledge found distributed within communities.

Leveraging sociocultural perspectives on learning and ethnographic methods, this dissertation takes up questions at the intersections of learning, literacy, power, science, and socioecological transformation. Chapter 1, the Introduction, synthesizes perspectives on these ideas from diverse fields such as education, science and technology studies, and political ecology. Chapter 2 empirically examines if and how power asymmetries mediate social learning trajectories as participants engage in deliberative dialogue in the Southern California case. The specific context is a project inspired by the principles of youth participatory action research in which educational researchers, students, educators, and land managers worked to co-design a community-based watershed monitoring initiative. Findings suggest that power asymmetries may constrain opportunities for learning in-the-moment by mediating joint activity, while simultaneously creating the conditions for expansive learning to later occur. Chapters 3 and 4 empirically examine the construct of community science literacy, examining how local residents engage in field-based data collection to assess the health of a local creek and share data with land managers and scientists to inform adaptive management in the Western Montana case. In conceptualizing science literacy as a collective phenomenon rather than an individual trait, Chapter 3 examines how the work of monitoring is distributed across individuals and social structures. Findings demonstrate how individuals contribute their respective knowledge and practices to monitoring through processes of coordination work, and how these processes are mediated by individuals’ opportunity to shift roles, the presence of brokers, and power relations. Chapter 4 builds on the findings from Chapter 3, taking up coordination work as an analytic lens to examine the role of material artifacts and the natural world in shaping processes of community science literacy. Findings from this chapter indicate that community science literacy, material artifacts, and the natural world are inextricably linked, suggesting community science literacy ought to be understood as a sociomaterial practice. Results from these three interrelated yet distinct chapters are synthesized in Chapter 5, the Conclusion.

In its entirety, this dissertation looks beyond the level of the individual to argue that community-based and place-based learning environments provide rich opportunities to activate the knowledge and practices found distributed within communities toward socioecological transformation. Doing so, however, requires disrupting hierarchies that privilege dominant scientific knowledge over other ways of knowing in both environmental management and in education. Honoring the local knowledge found in communities can support more equitable forms of learning that catalyze moves toward more healthy and just socioecological futures.