Conference Program

Citizen science as a concept and practice has gained a lot of interest in the 21st century. Citizen science is commonly understood as voluntary public participation in scientific research by non-professional citizens. This participation can include gathering data for research, interpreting and analysing data or co-creating the whole research with scientists (Bonney et al., 2009). One of the defining features of citizen science is that participating citizens are not themselves the subject of study (Open Science Coordination in Finland, Federation of Finnish Learned Societies, 2022). Alongside citizen science there is also citizen social science and citizen humanities. In my own work I understand citizen science in the Finnish context where the word “tiede” (science) covers all the different academic disciplines. Therefore, my usage of the word citizen science contains also citizen humanities and citizen social science.

Citizen science has been seen to contain great potential for conducting science education in both informal and formal settings (see e.g. Bonney et al., 2009; Lüsse et al., 2022). In the context of formal education citizen science can for example provide a way to foster critical thinking and problem-solving (Shah & Martinez, 2016) as well as to enhance multidimensional understanding of the relevance of science (Lüsse et al., 2022).

In the research concerning different educational aspects of citizen science there has also been discussion about the democratic possibilities of science education based on citizen science (see e.g. Mueller & Tippins, 2012; Gray et al., 2012; Oesterle et al., 2019). These studies have given a critical look to themes such as community, power-relations, local knowledge, nature of participation, critical agency, and the role of marginalized students.

In my own work I want to join this discussion by studying citizen science through the lenses of democracy education (see e.g. Männistö, 2020; Rautiainen et al., 2023). Democracy education contains the notion that democracy should be included to education in three different ways. The practice of education should be democratic, the content of education should be about democracy (i.e. critical understanding about society), and the relationship between schools and larger society should be interactional (Männistö & Fornaciari, 2017; Tomperi & Piattoeva, 2005). In my research I will compare these three aspects of democracy education with notions raised in the earlier studies concerning citizen science and science education. My goal is to broaden our understanding about the relationship between citizen science, democracy and education, and offer new insights on how citizen science could act as a form of democracy education.