Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

Large citizen science programmes have long incorporated wide-scale input from a distance to produce knowledge outside of the academy. At the Citizen Science Academy within University College London’s Bartlett, we take this further by engaging up close – training and empowering cohorts of citizen social scientists, who go on to impact policy, influence developers, and create the kinds of knowledge that only locals can produce. This talk discusses our work across the London Borough of Camden – the Good Life Euston, Euston Young Voices, and Camden Council Citizen Science-in-Residence programmes. We focus on not only creating useful knowledge, but also running transformative training for those who may not normally engage with higher education. Our citizen social scientists are therefore not only paid the London Living Wage throughout their training, but also receive a UCL Citizen Science Certificate on completion – a new accreditation for practice-based, community-centred education. By forming collaborations between academia, local government, voluntary sector organisations, developers, and local citizens, knowledge can be produced that takes a tailored approach to understanding what an area wants, needs, or fears; knowledge that can then be taken into account when considering what the future should look like. Alongside providing an overview of the programmes and their impact on planning the future built environment, you will also hear from Suraya Miah, who received her Citizen Science Certificate for the Euston Young Voices project and has gone on to become a teaching assistant on other citizen social science programmes.