Discarded food wrappers laying on the ground in public parks. A pair of old toilets dumped in a ditch. Trash tossed on the highway.
These are a few examples of the kind of waste Arvin High School senior Jonathan Agredano found in his community as he participated in an environmental justice project he completed last school year as part of the Kern High Student Storytelling Fellowship funded by the National Geographic Society.
“Even in a small town like Arvin, there’s a lot of trash, a lot of plastic,” he said. “It’s not just the big cities that have a lot of waste. We need to do something about it.”
Agredano was one of 24 students who participated in the fellowship, in which they were tasked with completing online courses in videography, audio production and photography, then using what they learned to tell their own visual stories about an environmental issue challenging their community.
Agredano’s project incorporated both text and photos and highlights six areas across Arvin and Bakersfield where he spotted waste.
“My main goal was to educate people to be more careful about picking up their trash so we can make the town look cleaner,” he said. “This project was about how we can make an impact by telling our point of view and inspire other people to take action. It’s about making a positive change for the community.”
Dr. Brittney Beck — an assistant professor of teacher education at California State University, Bakersfield — received a $50,000 grant in 2021 from National Geographic to launch the fellowship program.
The program is part of her work with the Citizen Science Project, which was created at CSUB in 2018 to support teacher education programs focused on citizen science.
Students in the fellowship had to collect their own data and use that to inform their stories, which were then collected and made available online for the public to see.
“They gain a better understanding of the complex issues of environmental justice that we experience in the Valley and a better sense of their own capacity to be a part of the solution and to call for change,” she said.
In addition to their projects, students were able to participate in a week-long retreat last summer in Sequoia National Park, where they used their stories as guideposts to create an environmental justice course for educators that will be made available this summer.
In the meantime, National Geographic now has a free online course available to educators called Learning Through Citizen Science. The course, created in partnership with CSUB, consists of three modules aimed at introducing educators to the benefits of engaging students in this kind of scientific research.
Dr. Beck said the retreat was a transformative experience for many of the students.
“At the retreat, we tried to give them experiences that many of them have never had,” she said. “Most of them had never been outside of Bakersfield. Many of them had never seen a sky full of stars because the air pollution is so consistent and thick in Bakersfield.”
Dr. Beck said one student commented on how she was surprised to see there was no trash on the ground, as she frequently sees trash when she goes out in her neighborhood.
“She didn’t realize it was possible for people to be in a space, use it and not trash it,” she said. “It was this proof of possibility that people can live in nature, the surroundings can be beautiful and people can work together to keep it that way.”
Dr. Beck believes students’ participation in the fellowship not only got them thinking more seriously about issues involving environmental justice but also made them feel like they can make a difference in their communities.
“It not only built some of their competencies relating to storytelling and environmental justice but also helped to increase their sense of agency, the fact that their voice matters,” she said. One student said, ‘I felt as though I made an impact and I didn’t feel powerless.’ There was this awestruck perspective on what it means to live with nature and be in nature.”
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