Suzanne Russo, Mariana Montoya and Monica Bosquez

Community-university partnerships for environmental justice are becoming increasingly prominent in many American cities in which universities and low-income communities have historically experienced a contentious relationship. This article focuses upon a specific university-community partnership that drew on the perceptions of elementary school students to isolate and interpret environmental hazards in the neighborhood surrounding their school and homes. The aim is to highlight the institutional and social barriers that must be addressed to achieve some measure of success in these collaborative efforts. This case also emphasizes a specific challenge in community-based efforts—the inclusion of various age and socioeconomic groups found within a community, especially children and young adults. The inclusion of youth as research partners in environmental justice efforts is an important element in understanding how environmental issues affect an entire community, and for teaching our future leaders to think critically about their environment and ability to effect change.

In the spring semester of 2007, an applied GIS course led by Professor Bjorn Sletto in the Community and Regional Planning program at the University of Texas at Austin undertook an environmental justice project in partnership with People Organized in Defense of the Earth and Her Resources (PODER), an East Austin advocacy organization, and Zavala Elementary School, located in the heart of historic East Austin. The basic goal of the project was to assess the environmental hazards children attending Zavala are exposed to on their routes to and from school and to better understand and document their perceptions of environmental hazards. Recognizing the “untapped potential within the relationship between the university and its local community,” Dr. Sletto designed a course based upon service learning in East Austin (Brown, 2006, 2). Community-university partnerships built on service learning can offer students, at various educational levels, invaluable experience to develop the kind of ‘think-on-your-feet’ skills necessary for success in the real world, and an opportunity to put their class lessons into a real-life context. These partnerships offer community organizations labor, technical skills, and financial resources that otherwise might not be available while lending the university’s legitimacy and quality assurance to the project.

The class’s overall goal for the first semester of the East Austin Environmental Justice Project was three-pronged: (1) establish solid relationships with our community partners; (2) develop a model for data collection and analysis with youth as research partners; and (3) build a community information system that can be utilized by our community partners to educate residents and influence policy makers regarding environmental hazards in East Austin. At the beginning of the semester, the class refrained from creating a specific mission statement or establishing anticipated findings so that research tasks and goals could be developed in coordination with our community partners. To ensure the diverse research needs were accomplished, the class was divided into three teams, each responsible for coordination of materials development on research on their specific topic: volunteer and fi eld coordination, GIS, and design and media. During the first set of meetings with

PODER, a limited set of specific goals were established to guide the three teams in their work: develop a research project with teachers and students at Zavala Elementary School to document fi fth and sixth graders’ routes to school and their perception of the environment surrounding their school; develop a geographic information system that incorporates students’ travel routes and perceptions of the urban environment; develop a set of products that would  combine to form a model community information system, including interactive GIS, a poster, and papers, all incorporated in a user-friendly web site; and develop a research manual for other community-university partnerships investigating children’s perceptions of the urban environment.

This paper provides an analysis of the class’s experience with community engagement and outreach. Provided here is a critical examination of community-university partnerships, focusing on the challenges and best practices of engaging community-based organizations and youth as research partners. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges we faced and an analysis of lessons learned in order to better facilitate future community-university partnerships in Austin and other communities.

Community-University Partnerships for Environmental Justice

One common method for involving communities in environmental justice (EJ) research and planning exercises is through community-university partnerships. These partnerships have great potential for both faculty and university students and the community, contributing to important community objectives as well as mending sometimes poor relationships between the university and its local community. However, significant challenges and obstacles often prevent these partnerships from coming to fruition or achieving their goals. Several challenges have been identified and examined at length within the academic community, including the perceived and actual power differential between a community organization and the university, differences in discourse and methodological approaches to research, academic/semester calendars that may impede sustained dialogue about needs or completion of ongoing projects, and faulty expectations about time commitments and material resources (Reardon, 1999; Holland, 2001; Williams et al, 2005).

Often the first major obstacle from universities’ point of view is the challenge of collaborating within a context of distinct power differentials, where the community perceives the university as a powerful, wealthy, and somewhat alien institution with little connection to their needs or aspirations. Some techniques are available to address this barrier. First, it is important to establish a positive relationship based upon a deep understanding that all collaborators are working to achieve a common goal. Second, open and transparent knowledge exchange is crucial to diminishing the power differential and building trust between partners (Holland, 2001). Third, all collaborators must have equal voice in establishing project goals, methodological approaches, and expected outcomes or deliverables (Reardon, 2005).

Universities often choose to target low-income, minority communities near university campuses for a partnership. In some cases the same community will be approached for numerous research projects and service learning courses sponsored by different departments over a number of years. While these projects might provide valuable research material for the university, the risk is that few, if any, concrete results or benefits are seen for the community. Community members and community-based organizations do not want to serve as a laboratory for university study and are skeptical of contributing their limited time toward a university partnership (Reardon, 1999; Green and Mercer, 2001). These realities can be overcome only by establishing a shared goal, clearly delineating a high degree of citizen participation in establishing the research goals and methods, maintaining transparency and communication, and spending time cultivating personal relationships and trust (Reardon, 1999).

Once the partnership and mutually developed goals are established, additional obstacles in the research process commonly arise. The reality that “community dynamics rarely share the methodical approach to research design and implementation that characterizes university-led studies” is the root of many of these obstacles (Williams et al, 2005, 294). To produce research results that will embody standards of objectivity and scientifi c rigor, which is important if project results aim to influence policy makers, the university team must often take the lead on research design and methodology. To accomplish this without controlling the project, the university team needs to exercise patience in establishing relationships of trust, and in “drawing limits around the research terrain itself” (Williams et al, 2005, 295) while allowing the community partners to direct the goals of the research.

An important method for continuing the dialogue over university-community partnerships on a meta scale is to produce reports and critiques written for a community audience, not only an academic audience, thus enabling the community to engage in dialogue and action along with academics (Hart and Wolff, 2006). On a micro scale, dialogue should be cultivated throughout the project with assessments serving as specific points of feedback from the community partners. Each collaborator “holds different goals and expectations for the project; arrives with different experiences, assets, and fears; and operates from a different sense of power and control” (Holland, 2001, 53). Regular assessments provide clarity on expectations and attitudes toward progress, and demonstrate a commitment to the needs and opinions of the community partner (Holland, 2001).

It is especially important to have a close dialogue and assessment process with community partners to clarify what products, services, or activities will be delivered, and over what time frame. A common problem with community-university partnerships is that students present their fi nal work (often an exploratory or interim project) at the end of a semester, then move on to other courses or activities, leaving the community behind with unmet expectations. Since the circadian rhythm of the university is based upon semesters or terms, community members and university participants need to delineate clear work objectives that can be completed in these limited time frames and develop a fi rm understanding of the commitment of faculty or students to continue or follow up once a course term is fi nished.

The term “community-university partnership” may be contentious since it implies participation by the entire, or at least a representative group from, the community. Working with a community-accountable organization, such as one with a board of directors elected by the community, is recommended to ensure the research produced is not skewed toward a special interest. Incorporating youth as research partners is important to gaining an understanding of the effects of environmental hazards on an entire community, since youth often are effected differently by and possess different perceptions of environmental agents than adults.

Giving Youth a Voice in Environmental Planning

Children have the right to a healthy and safe environment, education, recreation, and decision-making processes that address their needs (Varney and Vliet, 2005). However, children are rarely recognized as visible, individual subjects who can contribute to decision-making processes. As a result, few proper systems are available for children and young adults to communicate their needs and opinions in political and judicial decisions. Around the world a shift in this paradigm is occurring. Organizations and communities are recognizing that children have a right to inclusion in decisions that affect them (Kruger and Chawla, 2005), and that their input is valuable in understanding how policies will affect a community. As a result, these groups are developing models to allow children’s voices to be heard in the decision-making arena. Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted on November 20, 1989, by the United Nations, states that all children have the right to express themselves freely in all matters affecting them, and that they have the right to be heard in judicial and administrative processes that directly affect the child (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2007). Cities such as Johannesburg, South Africa (Kruger and Chawla, 2005), Sathyanager, South India (Driskell, Bannerjee, and Chawla, 2001), and organizations like Growing Up in Cities (Chawla, 2002) are putting this declaration into action by designing formal systems for children’s participation in environmental research, urban planning, and other administrative decisions.

One major challenge for EJ researchers and planning practitioners who want to include youth’s ideas, perceptions, and opinions in their research is the different perceptions youth have of the world around them. These differences in perception occur between youth and adults, and also within groups of youth whose emotional and mental development can greatly vary. Therefore, “consideration must be given to the ways in which states and adults view children and gain a proper understanding of their opinions, as well as ways in which adults can facilitate their participation” (Skivenes and Stranbu, 2006, 11). Research methodologies and opportunities for participation must be designed specifically to address the unique needs and attributes of younger community members. As Joy Carlson (2005) states, “children are not little adults. They interact with their environment differently” (225), and, therefore, experience different environmental effects and have different perceptions of the environment than adults.

Chao and Long (2004) speak of the necessity of involving youth in EJ research, since children and teens are among the most affected by environmental and public health decisions, and can help bring a fuller understanding of how environmental problems affect an entire community. However, working with youth can be very challenging, and it requires researchers to think about their methodology on a new level. Researchers may perceive youth as an easy window to a community rather than valuing what they can offer as active participants in the research. A few suggestions are offered for working successfully with teens on an EJ research project:

• Develop a methodology that is understandable and appealing to youth
• Maintain good communication throughout the entire project
• Ensure that the youth participants understand how their work fits into the different stages of the project
• Make the youth feel like an important part of the project—affirm that their inputs valuable (Chao and Long, 2004).

Matthew Goldwasser (2004) authored A Guide to Facilitating Action Research for Youth, in which he encourages teachers and activists to engage students in experiential learning, or service learning, through activist research. He suggests the use of three primary questions to organize the research and develop an action plan: what?, so what?, and now what? The “what” question examines what we want to accomplish through our research. This step seeks clearly laid-out goals and an analysis of the best ways to collect information to meet these goals. “So what” is asked after the research has been collected. This step analyzes what findings have been made and what these findings mean. “Now what” pushes participants to apply these findings to the situation, challenging the researchers to consider what comes next.

The challenges and benefits of involving youth researchers in university-community partnerships were demonstrated in the East Austin Environmental Justice Project. The importance of youth participation in this project was established early on, allowing all partners to coordinate schedules and develop appropriate research materials. The university class and PODER remained dedicated to youth participation in the research throughout the course of the semester, even though challenges were experienced in gaining participation and in collecting data that met PODER’s expectations. PODER’s experience working with youth and the class’s efforts to research and implement best practices enabled us to work effectively with the fifth-grade class at Zavala and the high school interns at PODER. The major challenges faced were coordination of schedules between PODER, Zavala, and UT students and gaining participation from students and teachers at Zavala. Our greatest success was the development of research and evaluation materials for use in storyboarding, mental mapping, and community mapping workshops that can be replicated in future years and in other environmental justice research projects.

Case Study: the East Austin Environmental Justice Project

The East Austin Environmental Justice Project is a multiyear community-university partnership between PODER and the Community and Regional Planning Program (CRP). The first stage of the project involved a collaboration between the applied GIS course taught by Assistant Professor Bjorn Sletto in the spring semester of 2007 and East Austin community partners PODER and Zavala Elementary School.

PODER was founded in 1991 by a group of Chicana/o East Austin activists with a mission to “redefine environmental issues as social and economic justice issues, and collectively setting our own agenda to address these concerns as basic human rights. We seek to empower our communities through education, advocacy, and action. Our aim is to increase the participation of communities of color in corporate and government decision making related to toxic pollution, economic development, and their impact on our neighborhoods” (PODER, 2007).

Since their founding, PODER has successfully rid East Austin of a gas tank farm and a Browning Ferris Industries (BFI) recycling center, and helped gain a stronger voice for East Austin residents within the political sphere. Currently, Susana Almanza and Erika González codirect PODER, while Sylvia Herrera, a founding member of PODER, serves as the health coordinator. Ms. Almanza is a former planning commissioner for the city of Austin, former member of the City of Austin Environmental Board, and current cochair of the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice. Ms. González coordinates all of PODER’s youth activities, including the Young Scholars for Justice internship program that “is dedicated to the development of youth and young adults of color to address education, environmental, economic, and social justice issues affecting them and ensure gender, racial, and resource equity. The project promotes youth and young adult integration in all areas of PODER’s program work” (PODER, 2007, 1).

PODER was selected as the ideal community partner because of their experience with and strong belief in working with young adults, their dedication to environmental justice in East Austin, and their strong reputation and trust within the East Austin community. From PODER’s perspective, a partnership with UT was desirable because of the personnel and technological resources that could be brought to the project, as well as the university’s reputation within the city government. Their hope was that information regarding hazards in East Austin might be more powerful to city officials if the data and reports were cocollected and coproduced by UT rather than by PODER alone.

The first semester of the partnership in the spring of 2007 had the central goal of collecting information on children’s perceptions of environmental hazards near their schools and homes in East Austin, and packaging this information in a format that PODER would be able to use to persuade policy makers that environmental hazards in their community need to be addressed by the city. Relationship-building between the university class and the East Austin community was the central factor in our ability to successfully devise and implement an appropriate methodology, and create a product useful to PODER.

The framework for our project was determined by Dr. Sletto and Susana Almanza prior to the beginning of the semester. In the fall of 2006, Dr. Sletto approached PODER as the principal community organization ideal for collaboration with the university due to their record of local environmental justice activism. During the initial discussions regarding the purpose and shape of the collaborative project, Ms. Almanza indicated that local parents were concerned about their children’s exposure to environmental hazards. Together she and Dr. Sletto drafted the initial framework of the project, specifically the goal of working with children through mapping in order to better understand their perceptions of and interactions with the environment.

During the semester several recurring challenges were pondered and addressed by all participants. These challenges included the ethics of representing children’s voices, prioritization of education or data collection, logistics of working with children of various ages, and coordinating multiple community partners. CRP students discussed at length the complexities of community-university partnerships, the approaches regarding best practices to foster relationships with local residents, and how to ensure that the community would be speaking for itself. We also aimed to balance theory with practice through a service learning framework.

Methodology

A three-phase experiential learning through action research project with students and teachers at Zavala Elementary School was developed based upon Matthew Goldwasser’s (2004) three-question framework of “what?, so what?, and now what?” The first experiential learning phase employed was storyboarding and mental mapping activities during class time at Zavala. These exercises addressed the concepts of environmental justice and environmental hazards while providing students an opportunity to express with their own drawings and words the places they consider to be hazardous and those they consider safe

within their neighborhood. The second phase of the research project was the mental mapping workshops that were intended to produce quantifi able information about students’ ability to isolate and document environmental hazards in their neighborhood. The third phase is development of a community information system (CIS) and is not yet complete. The CIS is based upon data gathered in the workshops and will allow PODER, Zavala Elementary students, and the East Austin community to create maps and share information about their environmental justice efforts.

UT students developed the storyboarding activity based on literature reviews, discussions in the classroom, and conversations with PODER and teachers from Zavala. Insights from Zavala fi fth grade teacher Mr. Guillermo Barrera were crucial to the development of an age-appropriate methodology. Mr. Barrera also assisted in developing the forms used for this activity, encouraged other teachers to participate, and integrated the mapping project into his curriculum. Participants at the workshops collaborated with UT students and PODER interns to map environmental hazards, called points of interest, within a specifi ed grid and collect sensory information on each point of interest. Our class spent several weeks creating and refi ning the methodology to collect this information from the Zavala students.

Two storyboarding activities were held on March 1 and March 21, 2007, with students from the fi fth and sixth grades of Zavala Elementary. Members of PODER participated in both events, presenting the main goals of the project, the importance of children’s perceptions in EJ research, and a discussion of environmental hazards in the neighborhood. A community mapping workshop followed each storyboarding activity, with workshops held on March 4 and March 24.

During the first storyboarding event, UT students, Mr. Barrera, and a sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Gabriel Estrada, instructed their classes to draw “places I like” and “places I do not like.” UT students also provided each child with a large-scale map of the neighborhood and asked them to draw their routes from home to school. For the second storyboarding activity, involving only sixth-graders, Mr. Estrada suggested a change in the methodology. Instead of completing storyboards, the children drew a mental map of their route from home to school, documenting the “places they liked” or places they “did not like” along these routes and the reasons why. This more sophisticated exercise was thought to be a better learning exercise for the sixth-grade class. The storyboarding and mental mapping exercises yielded information about Zavala students’ perceptions of their physical environment—the place they liked and didn’t like—and of their spatial understanding. The exercises also provided us with an opportunity to introduce the topic of environmental justice to these students in preparation for their role as researchers at the community mapping workshops. The purpose of the workshops was to gain detailed, quantifi able information about youth perceptions of specific places, and their exposure to environmental hazards near their school and home.

Each workshop began with a registration table where students turned in their permission forms and provided their address. The area around Zavala was divided into grids of eight to ten blocks. Students were placed within the grid closest to or encompassing their home—it was assumed that students would be more interested in or have more comments about the area most familiar to them. Workshop participants were put into teams of two to four students with at least two adults in each team for the mapping exercise.

After the first workshop, debrief meetings were held with PODER and the university class to get feedback on the methodology and data. While comments from the university students related to technical aspects of data collection and the challenges of working with children, comments from PODER were focused on equity in our process, consciousness of gender and race relations, and dissatisfaction with the UT students’ hands-off approach to identifying the points of interest. PODER viewed the workshops as an opportunity to educate students about the environmental hazards surrounding Zavala, and thereby influenced which places students selected as points of interest. UT students had a scientific obligation to allow Zavala students to select the points of interest without interference from adults or other youth in the workshop. The Zavala partners thought the data collected was valuable because it showed the strengths and limitations of their students’ knowledge about the environment, thereby facilitating the development of an appropriate environmental education program.

The debrief meetings led to important conversations about working with community partners, including harmonizing the goals of education with a scientific research methodology, understanding how the university’s history in East Austin affects our partnership, and clarifying PODER’s goals for this project. The debrief meetings also led to refinement of the research methodology, both for the second workshop and for future semesters. Comments from PODER made it apparent that we needed to provide specific roles for each person so that everyone would understand their responsibilities and to ensure that each participant had a meaningful opportunity to contribute. The newly established roles were workshop coordinator, team leader, team support, and process documenter. We also realized that more time and effort needed to be focused on educating students about environmental hazards in the classroom to avoid education in the fi eld that might influence what the students document as their own perceptions, thereby unethically biasing the data. We were not able to put this lesson into action during the first semester, but it will be an important element in the future. 

During the semester, university students spent time establishing trust with one another other and with PODER. In addition to time built into the class syllabus intended specifically to build trust between PODER and Dr. Sletto’s class, project goals were discussed in depth throughout the semester, leading to continual development and refinement of our research methodologies. A number of issues were grappled with in the classroom while analyzing the project goals, including: establishing the role of UT students, particularly whether students would be working as partners or client/patrons with PODER; how to harmonize academic and activist goals; and whether the purpose of the project would be to provide a service to one particular organization or the community at large. Negotiating positionality as nonresidents of the service area and perceived “gentrifi ers” of East Austin also factored into the initial organizational and trust-building process. These concerns continued to guide class efforts to be transparent, inclusive, and respectful of stylistic differences in developing the methodology. Respecting and learning from PODER’s extensive on-the-ground experience was also a class ambition.

As the project progressed, a dynamic web of relationships was created, leading to new partnerships and successes as well as to logistical and communicative challenges. In addition to the twelve students in the applied GIS course were three American Youth Works Computer Corps volunteers, two PODER interns, and faculty members at Zavala Elementary School. From a pedagogical perspective, much of the responsibility for coordinating workshops, reviewing project progress, and communicating goals, ideas, and concerns was transferred from Dr. Sletto to the planning students. This enabled students to have ownership of the project and fully participate in the community-university partnership.

UT students experienced the fl uid nature and malleable end goals that resulted from the highly participatory nature of the project. The GIS team reassessed how best to design and burnish research tools to meet goals in light of feedback from PODER, class discussions, and logistical realities. For example, because of its active schedule, PODER was only able to participate in one of the two weekend activities. The UT students also became the de facto liaisons with Zavala teachers, who became critical partners in the data collection process. Students had not anticipated working directly with Zavala due to their initial efforts to defer to PODER as the primary liaison; however, it became necessary as the semester-based time frame of the project placed pressure on scheduling options and deadlines for the UT and Zavala partners. The necessary compression of semester-based projects was an issue that had been considered by the class (Esnard, Gelobter, and Morales, 2004), but not experienced firsthand.

Interclass dynamics evolved as each of the three teams worked through creative differences. The GIS team faced the difficult task of organizing and representing data gathered through the mapping exercises in a way that best represented the overall goals of the community colleagues. The design team struggled to visually represent the project while considering the need to speak to a diverse audience including the academic community, city officials, and local partners. The fieldwork team strove to maintain meaningful learning opportunities for the Computer Corps volunteers, maintain communication with PODER and Zavala Elementary, and coordinate efforts between class members.

Research Process and Results

Storyboarding Storyboarding was selected as a method to facilitate children’s participation in the identifi cation of environmental hazards in East Austin because it is a form of storytelling that allows children to represent their observations and impressions of the world around them through a visual medium. By organizing different events and experiences, stories can help children to construct their own world and to arrive at a better understanding of it (Lake, 2003). The storyboarding exercise in this project allowed children to illustrate, with words and pictures, places in their community that they liked or disliked, and to prepare them for the workshop that was aimed at gathering more data about perceptions of environmental hazards in East Austin.

While some children noted perceptions of environmental hazards, most of the children from both grades did not include commonly recognized environmental hazards in their drawings or maps. Only 13 percent of the drawings included the most significant environmental hazards near the elementary school. Most of the sites children disliked were viewed as threatening and unsafe, such as parks with drug dealers, streets with excessive traffic, and abandoned houses. Most of the children chose to draw the playground at Zavala Elementary as their favorite place. These findings can be interpreted in different ways. It may be possible that children did not include hazardous places because they do not know what they are: children have limited knowledge about officially recognized hazardous materials sites. On the other hand, children may know about these hazards and the potential harm they may cause, yet their familiarity with these sites may make them indifferent. In future research, we would like to discuss the drawings with the kids and with their teachers to get a better understanding of why they chose to include or exclude specific locations.

A significant problem with the sixth-grade participants was that many of their mental maps were missing “important places,” in part because of lack of instruction by the teacher and UT students. But it is important to recognize that this activity was not part of the sixth-grade curriculum, which meant it was “something else” they needed to do instead of other planned activities. In addition, the sixth graders had completed a storyboard before, so they might have been confused about redrawing these same places again on their mental map.

The storyboards and mental maps provided valuable information about Zavala students’ perceptions of their environment. Most importantly, these perceptions were expressed by the students themselves through their own drawings and descriptions. Creative self-expression enables students to explore their own ideas and understanding of their physical environment, associations they have with particular places, and how they feel about specific places and why.

This type of personal exploration provides youth with an opportunity to internalize environmental justice. However, to expand on the information collected through mental mapping and storyboarding, we needed quantifi able, scientific data that could be integrated into a GIS system. Therefore, we followed up the in-class exercises with Saturday community mapping workshops intended to gather sensory data on places youth deemed to be environmental hazards, and to evaluate each block within the Zavala Elementary School feeder district.

Community mapping workshops The community mapping workshops allowed the Zavala students to serve as researchers, journalists, and cartographers, while also providing an opportunity to teach these young students how to critically analyze their environment, and to collect data on their perceptions of environmental hazards. For the organizers of these workshops, the greatest challenge was recruiting students to attend—getting participation at community events is notoriously difficult. The most influential factor in how many students attended the workshops was support of key faculty members at Zavala. Mr. Guillermo Barrera (Mr. B), a fifth-grade teacher, served as our primary contact at Zavala and was highly supportive of our efforts to map environmental hazards in Austin; he worked with our class to develop the research methodology, devoted his class time to teaching mapping and environmental hazards, and required his students to attend the Saturday workshop. Mr. Estrada, a sixth-grade teacher, allowed us to work with his class to collect mental maps of the neighborhood from his students and discuss environmental hazards. However, Mr. Estrada was not as involved in the project as Mr. Barrera, and only one of Mr. Estrada’s students attended our second workshop. Despite this, the support of these teachers granted us access to a group of young people with unique knowledge about the areas around Zavala.

The second factor in the success of the workshops was creating a methodology to collect information on environmental hazards that the children were able to understand and respond to. This meant wording our questions and providing a form for collecting the children’s perceptions in terminology that they would comprehend. With Mr. Barrera’s help we chose a set of six aspects of locations, smell, sound, look, cleanliness, fun, and safety, with a gradient of fifth grade–appropriate terminology, that workshop participants could use to rate their perceptions of each site they chose to record as a “point of interest” (see figure 1). It was important that we maintained an age-appropriate approach to the entire workshop. This included games at the beginning of the event, a playful attitude, appropriate language on the data collection forms, and an appropriate length of time spent in the field. We learned in the second workshop that even a one-year grade difference can change whether our forms and our questions were age-appropriate, though within grades mental maturity and scientific sophistication can vary greatly as well.

Though designing our methodology was the most time-consuming aspect of the workshops, gaining the support of the teachers turned out to be the biggest challenge. We learned that without the engagement of teachers, we had very little chance of gaining strong interest and participation from students. Engaging parents in the project was also challenging. We originally anticipated that parents would accompany their children on the mapping walks, providing an opportunity to capture parents’ perspectives as well. However, only one parent attended either of the workshops. Lack of parent engagement in school activities is an ongoing problem.

A major lesson of the project was the difference between how our class and our community project partner, PODER, measured success. From our academic perspective, success meant that we were able to implement our devised methodology and gather accurate data. PODER wanted to gather data that showed there were environmental hazards affecting children in the neighborhood while educating the community about these hazards. While we shared the desire to make a case for redress of these environmental justice issues in East Austin, as academics we were reluctant to take a more activist approach in the data-gathering process. Since one of our initial aims was to serve as a facilitator of PODER’s goals, we needed to keep our priorities and goals aligned with those of PODER.

Though we constantly questioned our approach and critiqued our methodologies to account for PODER’s goals, tensions did arise between our responsibility to maintain an ethically pure research project and PODER’s responsibility to gather persuasive information about hazards to children in East Austin. While we did not consider our data biased, the debate over our role as academics or facilitators for PODER’s agenda should be considered in greater depth for future projects. Communication between the university and the community partner on this subject prior to implementation of the methodology should be considered of paramount importance.

All collaborators were pleased with the materials, data management, and maps created through the course of the semester. However, as previously discussed, when asked to map environmental hazards, children recorded sites they felt threatened by, such as abandoned houses, parks occupied by drug dealers, bars, and mean dogs. Therefore, our results did not meet PODER’s expectations of gathering data on children’s perceptions of environmental hazards such as metal processing plants and other businesses that emit toxic fumes. When we began processing the data, it appeared our maps would be of little use to PODER. However, as PODER discussed the project’s findings with the community and policy makers, the maps of children’s perceptions have proven to be powerful in bringing attention to the pollution and safety hazards faced by children in East Austin.

In June of 2007, Susana Almanza and Erika Gonzalez invited our class to present the findings of our research to the City Council in an effort to persuade the city of Austin that the area surrounding Zavala needs to be rezoned to rid the neighborhood of industrial uses. Two council members responded positively to the presentation and vowed to work with the community to address the environmental hazards.

Despite the frustrations and disappointments felt by all parties at some point during our partnership, the process of undertaking this project helped establish a working relationship between PODER and the university. This portends future partnerships between these two groups, building upon these past experiences to create greater change in the years to come. As such, this exercise demonstrated the promise of more long-term community-university partnerships.

Community-university partnerships are essential in an age when universities have increasingly deep impacts on the communities surrounding them. The array of resources available to public universities places upon them an obligation to work toward the betterment of the communities of which they are a part. The constant tension in these partnerships over the struggle to negotiate course goals and academic ethics with the immediate needs of a community partner and its activist goals should serve as a valuable learning experience for both groups. In our experience, PODER would have gotten results closer to their expectations if we had prompted children on the walks to comment on what we consider environmental hazards rather than allowing the children to self-select the points they consider to be environmental hazards. The latter type of data, and analysis of why points were or were not considered environmental hazards to children, is valuable for discussions of theory and in identifying potential unsafe areas in the neighborhood, but it appeared not to serve the immediate interests of PODER.

Conclusion

While participants in this community-university partnership had different expectations and different opinions regarding the data produced, everyone considered the project a success with the awareness that improvements would be made in future semesters. Through the mental mapping, storyboarding exercises, and two community mapping workshops we collected valuable data on children’s perceptions of their environment. Over the course of the semester, a methodology was developed that can be replicated in future years; a framework for a community information system was built; partnerships between the university, the East Austin community, and Zavala Elementary School were deepened; and a clear plan for improving participation and data collection in the future was developed.

Although the storyboarding activity needs refinement, it helped illustrate the difference between children’s and expert perceptions of “environmental hazards” and safety. It also showed that children have limited knowledge about local environmental hazards. They have extensive spatial knowledge about their neighborhood, and this knowledge was reflected in their mental maps. This contradiction and lack of environmental awareness should be discussed with teachers and perhaps addressed through educational interventions in the future. It is important to plan storyboarding activities in close cooperation with teachers so they can include them as part of their class curricula. The more related these activities are to their classwork, the more the teachers can be committed to this type of project.

Upon completion of the initial project and the semester, the UT students had learned that the dynamic nature of community-university partnerships demands fl exibility, patience, and the ability to release ownership of a joint effort when many partners are involved. The goal of serving the community through a community-university partnership has led to much additional time reviewing the vision of the project, maintaining open channels of communication, and refi ning research methodologies. The confl icting expectations and approaches between partners became “learning opportunities,” as one student put it, opportunities for dialogue and a deepened understanding of our partners. The learning experience in itself became as rewarding as the findings produced by the act of collaboration.

The ultimate success and impact of this project will depend on sustaining and further building the relationship between the three groups across academic years and semesters. This experience shows that building trust and relationships, understanding the real terrain of specific communities, and developing information and findings useful to a community can rarely be accomplished in a four-month class period. Future semesters will serve to refine the data collection methodology, expand the community information system, and bring the city of Austin into our project as a partner in developing solutions for the environmental hazards in East Austin.

MARIANA MONTOYA is a doctoral student in the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Geography and the Environment. Building upon her undergraduate studies in biology at the Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina in Peru and master’s in science in ecosystem management at the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California, Mexico, Mariana’s current research is focused on political ecology and environmental integrity in the Peruvian Amazon (2007).

SUZANNE RUSSO achieved a bachelor’s of arts in Humanities from the University of Texas at Austin in 2004, focusing on integrated rural development in Africa. After a semester at American University’s graduate program in sustainable development, Suzanne completed a master’s of science in Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas. During her time in Austin, Suzanne worked with a variety of organizations to secure affordable housing, sustainable food systems, and walkable cities (2007).

MONICA BOSQUEZ is pursuing her master’s in Latin American Studies and is employed as a development specialist with the Texas Office of Rural Community Affairs, where she works on self-help water and wastewater projects throughout the state. As a returned environmental conservation volunteer for the Peace Corps in Panama, she maintains close ties with coffee producers, artisans, and community groups in that region. Monica recently completed a Ford Fellows consultancy in central Mexico and is looking to incorporate the experience into her research interests in multilevel partnerships and community development in rural areas (2007).

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