August 14, 2025
By Jill Grace, Susan Gomez Zwiep, and Emily Harris
K–12 education has the potential to be an important part of real-world solutions to a pressing problem of our time: the rapid loss of biodiversity in urban communities. One of the underlying goals of the Empowering Changemakers: Urban-biodiversity Initiative for Teachers and Youth (ECUITY) project is to empower youth to protect the biodiversity in their community.
The inspiration for this project is derived from a key target of L.A.’s Green New Deal: zero net loss of native biodiversity in Los Angeles by 2035. To accomplish this, we set out with our project partners to build the professional learning and resources needed to support teachers so that they could do what they do best: set the stage for promoting the care and capacity of their students to enact change.
“The knowledge of how influential teachers can be to kids really influenced me to get education as part of our Biodiversity Index for the City of L.A.”
— Mas Dojiri
Los Angeles Sanitation and Environment
Sustaining biodiversity is an urgent environmental need with great potential for youth engagement and action. Biodiversity is declining worldwide at an unprecedented rate, and the human communities that disproportionately suffer the negative effects of this decline are at greatest risk (IPBES, 2019; Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, 2020).
Threats to biodiversity include factors that impact all types of places; are observable to students; and have practical solutions that are implementable at homes and schools, unleashing the potential for building student knowledge and agency. They also surface unbalanced outcomes in systems, providing an opportunity to center justice in science learning.
For this project to be successful, we had to focus on students and their place in the learning in authentic ways. We provided resources for teachers to carefully facilitate learning, which, in turn, provided the support for students to persist when learning was rigorous and motivated students to enact change. This was important in a community where many people hold different perceptions of urban youth.
Los Angeles happens to be a globally recognized biodiversity hot spot, and this was an opportunity to shine a light on what it looks like for middle school students not only to be the next generation of environmental stewards but also to shine a light on what it looks like to be stewards now, working to enhance that biodiversity.
To accomplish this, we set out to partner classroom teachers, local scientists, and science education experts who would receive professional learning and support to develop grade-level learning sequences and resources in grades 6–8 that meet science standards with clear, justice-centered biodiversity goals.
Learning Anchored by Justice-Centered Phenomena
In early development, as unit phenomena (observable events that cause students to ask questions and that can be explained with science ideas) were being decided upon, it became clear that the phenomena that yielded the highest interest—to the hundreds of students surveyed—and elicited the most ideas and questions that matched targeted science ideas were those that were also relevant and meaningful to students.
We selected the phenomena in an attempt to honor students’ voices and provide opportunities for students to share and build on what they and their communities know and value. We crafted each learning sequence to include instructional practices that support surfacing such assets.
The learning sequences also centered student sense-making on data that inevitably reveal unequal distribution of resources and other imbalances in the system. All of this shows that those in places where communities have limited environmental spaces and resources are most likely to be negatively affected.
Phenomenon Highlight: Grade 8
At the beginning of the grade 8 learning sequence, students are introduced to the phenomena by exploring the biodiversity of their school campus (if there is any) to surface prior knowledge of biodiversity and reflect on how they feel at times when they’ve been in places with higher versus lower biodiversity. They are asked to consider evidence they want to gather and to eventually conduct a survey of their classmates who have spent time with biodiversity and those who have not and to note the impact that biodiversity or the lack thereof has on their classmates’ mental health. They then unpack these data along with empirical data and reading and make a claim about the connection between access to nature and mental health.
Supporting Teachers With Justice-Centered Science Learning
Focusing science learning on phenomena such as heat islands, shifts in patterns of biodiversity, and health impacts on those with and those without access to biodiverse spaces reveals disproportionate impacts on neighborhoods. This was a novel approach for our science teachers who field-tested units. The approach creates a unique dynamic in which students engage with phenomena that reveal a problem affecting their community, which is situated within a system that hasn’t always treated everyone fairly.
For some, the personal nature of such disproportionate impacts seemed like a normal part of conversations students had with their teachers. For those for whom this wasn’t common, there was an initial feeling of uncertainty and discomfort, which left them unsure how to navigate with students in a supportive way.
After just a couple of weeks, a middle school science teacher shared that giving his students an opportunity to engage in learning about an environmental issue and to have conversations about how the students can create change in their community is the one thing that gives students hope in today’s world.
As we field-tested the learning sequences with teachers and students, we realized that situating the unit within the context of a local and relevant issue brought out strong opinions and feelings from students. For example, in one 8th grade class, conversations about access to biodiversity brought up issues of economic disparity that were concerning to students.
Classroom discussions tended to be tense, and it was difficult to brush aside the intentional policies that created the issues under study. However, we found that these conversations were necessary for the education we were trying to provide and the agency we were trying to foster in our students.
We found that it is important to not avoid the uncomfortable. Here are a few key recommendations that supported our teachers:
Meet students where they are and contextualize the learning. Use simple language to define terms and the treatment of people. Acknowledge that decisions made in the past still impact people today, and they even impact other species. Give time and space when students or their families have personal connections to the topic. Give space for listening, acknowledging, and humanizing. Frame discussions as opportunities to discuss and learn about fairness and the ways in which students can be a part of solutions.
Reach out to your history/social studies teacher colleague for support. History/social studies teachers usually have a lot of experience with and strategies for helping students navigate the unfair treatment of people.
Empower youth in their place by focusing on resilience and community action. (1) This project leaned into engineering design when appropriate in order to support students in taking their science knowledge and putting it into action: This allowed students to clearly define problems, criteria, and constraints to inform problem-solving. Placing problem-solving in a sociocultural context provided a novel way of thinking about engineering design that elevated the importance of community involvement in the design process. (2) This project recommends enacting a culminating task: Supporting students in not just proposing but also enacting their plan allows them to have reciprocity with the land, and it is critical to supporting youth in shifting power dynamics and allowing them to feel that they have power in their place.
Enacting a Culminating Task
Eighth-grade students at one school were motivated to welcome greater bird diversity to their campus after observing the diversity of bird species during a visit to a community partner site. Their data showed that only bird species common in urban-developed environments were present in their school garden.
Given their school’s location adjacent to businesses and refineries, students designed a culminating project to construct a “hopscotch” habitat that would enable their campus to function as a wildlife corridor for a broader range of bird species. One class built structures to provide food and nesting opportunities for target species, while another class planted native plants.
Both classes developed plans for ongoing observations and data collection to monitor changes in bird species diversity.
As we reflect on the work of the ECUITY project, what becomes clear is that justice-centered science learning is not just about content—it’s also about connection, context, and community action. When students see that their learning is relevant to their lives and their neighborhoods, they show us what it means to be active stewards and changemakers now—not someday in the future.
By empowering teachers with the tools, knowledge, and support to guide these experiences, we are not only meeting science standards—we are cultivating hope, agency, and a generation ready to imagine and build a more biodiverse and just future.
Visit the Empowering Changemakers: Urban-biodiversity Initiative for Teachers and Youth (ECUITY) project for more information and resources.
About the Authors
Jill Grace is a project director at WestEd and co–Principal Investigator for the ECUITY project. She leads the K–12 Alliance, a WestEd Science and Engineering Project, and directs the design and coordination of programs for educators throughout all levels of the education system that innovate science teaching, learning, and leadership.
Susan Gomez Zwiep is a senior science educator and Director of Teacher Learning at BSCS Science Learning and Key Personnel for the ECUITY project. Her work focuses on effective models for professional development programs for K–16 and integrated content designs and teaching models that meet the needs of diverse learners.
Emily Harris is a senior research scientist at BSCS Science Learning and Advisor for the ECUITY project. She specializes in climate and place-based science education. She leads R&D projects developing instructional resources that help teachers incorporate local phenomena into reform-based instruction.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. 2200830. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these materials do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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