The United Nation’s 4th sustainable development goal calls for inclusive and equitable quality education for all. This includes broad educational goals such as supporting students’ agency to navigate a complex and uncertain world with broad sets of knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values. Based on our work at the Taking Citizen Science to School (TCSS) research center, I find an opportunity to achieve such goals in school participation in a social phenomenon, known as citizen science, where scientists partner with the public to advance scientific research. However, implementation, not to mention scaling-up of school participation in citizen science endeavors are hard-to-achieve. To address this, TCSS has developed unique modus operandi to work in multi-expertise partnerships, whereby teachers, students, school administrators, environmental activists, educational policymakers, and scientists join forces. Sharing their expertise, the various partners in these research-practice partnerships co-design technology-enhanced learning environments that open up exciting opportunities for school students to take part in real scientific research, while also conducting their own inquiry projects. For example, in the project Sleep is One-Third of Our Life, schools help develop sleeping journals for collecting data and exploring youths’ sleeping habits. To support participants in coalescing insights across settings and expertise, a web-platform has been developed for sharing implementation stories conveying various stakeholders’ perspectives, and curriculum materials employing design principles that connect emerging insights from research and practice. Findings highlight the potential of this approach to transform learning of students, school practitioners and scientists, as well as guidelines for supporting these unique partnerships.

Yael Kali is a Professor of technology enhanced learning at the University of Haifa, and a fellow of the International Society of the Learning Sciences since 2021. She is the founding director of two Israeli centers of research excellence—Learning In a NetworKed Society (LINKS, 2012-2018) and Taking Citizen Science to School (TCSS, 2017-2023). Using design-based research and design-based implementation research, Kali explores technology-enhanced learning and teaching at various contexts and age levels, from junior high school to higher education, and as part of teacher professional development programs. Her work focuses on the role of design principles for supporting learning and collaborative design, especially within networks of research-practice partnerships. She has served as an Associate Editor for the journal Instructional Science from 2012 to 2020, and was a visiting scholar at the Centre for Research on Computer Supported Learning & Cognition, University of Sydney (2010-2011), and at the School of Education, University of Colorado Boulder (2018).