Education, Resilience, and Scenarios: Creating Capacity for Community- Based Observations through Youth Engagement

Abstract

Education and learning possess powerful potential in affecting future resilience and community-based monitoring. This research focuses on examining the connections and feedbacks between social-environmental systems (SESs), resilience, and compulsory education. We suggest scenarios development as a way to link local-scale interest in change to education and monitoring of key variables for resilience. SESs have been problematized as frequently having a poor fit between environmental change and policy solutions. This has led to discussion and debate over the role of schools in addressing local knowledge, environmental changes, and community priorities. In Alaska and other Arctic countries, the role of public schools in improving this fit has been largely overlooked. This research explains that as extensions of governments, public schools offer an opportunity to create better linkages between societies and environments through governance. Secondarily, at the individual level, education is a vital component of resilience, but such education must embrace multiple perspectives in its curriculum in order to honor and access the diversity offered by local, traditional ecological knowledge and Western methods. Scenarios are inherently transdisciplinary processes that integrate different knowledge perspectives as participants consider what matters the most and what is most uncertain in the long-range future. We report research results from two linked scenarios projects. The Northern Alaska Scenarios Project (NASP) drew resident expert participants from the North Slope and Northwest Arctic Boroughs and the Arctic Future Makers project (AFM) that completed a scenarios exercise with high school students from across the Northwest Arctic Borough.