Approaching middle-school student science learning and sustainability dilemmas through co-creation processes with science professionals

Environmental sustainability dilemmas may be perceived by students as unattainable and difficult to deal with. To circumvent this, research suggests employing encouraging principles such as empowerment, local ownership, collaboration, and resilience. In this study, we sought to explore middle-school students’ learning about science through engaging them in a co-creation process. This meant that fifth graders worked with local urban planning, water usage reduction and water pollution together with science professionals. The classroom observations were analysed through the framework of scientific habits of mind. The results pointed to that co-creation encouraged and enhanced discussions and created opportunities for the students to employ different aspects of science. The discussions were driven by the participants as a curiosity statement could lead to new utterances of rationality, objectivity or suspension of belief. This way of argumentation may socialise the students into a scientific way of reasoning and the interactions become opportunities for learning about science.