The project sought to address the problem that technological innovation can bring about greater levels of sustainability only when all citizens are able to engage with the technology (Bhamra, Lilley and Tang, 2011; Lockton, Harrison and Stanton, 2008). It sought to enhance public understanding of the concept of sustainability, and practical steps to achieving this, by people who are commonly excluded from public education initiatives. To this end, a five-day STEM summer scheme on the theme of sustainability was planned, held in two non-formal learning venues. The project was designed to meet the following objectives for young people with Additional Support Needs (ASN) living in an area of an area of deprivation in the west of Scotland:

• To enhance participants’ awareness of what is meant by sustainability at a local, national, and international level
• To introduce participants to different aspects of sustainable technologies, through interaction with scientists and technologists
• To give participants hands on experience of strategies that will bring them and their community closer to sustainability

            Academics working in relevant area of STEM were invited to devise and run a 90-minute workshop showing how their research was enhancing sustainability for the young people. Discussions about the workshops and the form the scheme would take were fostered by three workshops led an external partner who specialises in promoting inter-disciplinary conversations. All invited workshop leaders had been identified through the university’s ‘STEM Equals’ initiative which sought to promote applications for Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (ESPRC) funding from under-represented groups. Through participating in the project, they were offered the chance to provide evidence of addressing the EPSRC’s mission and so enhanced their ability to position themselves favourably for future bids.

The project was conceptualised as critical pedagogy, in which social justice and democracy are integral to the teaching and evaluation (Breuing, 2011). The underpinning model for the scheme was transformational learning theory’, which posits that changes in thinking, beliefs and behaviours can be wrought only when prior assumptions are challenged (Meziro, 2000). Such shifts, although qualitatively different for the young people and the academics, were being sought in both workshop leaders and workshop participants. The framework is commonly associated with attempts to build capacity, but this project was unusual in explicitly seeking to achieve capacity building in the academics and young people through mutual interactions. It also drew on the ideas of Fricker (2007) and took active steps, through recruitments processes and practical organisation, to guard against epistemic injustice for either workshop leaders or young people. This notion considers those whose perspectives are not incorporated into knowledge creation, either because they are excluded from the process, for examples by assumptions of what they can achieve, or because they cannot understand or be understood by those creating the knowledge. This required scrutiny of all aspects of the scheme, for example, travel arrangements of participants to and from the site, availability of suitable clothing for the outdoor environment as well as catering arrangements and support for communication. Drawing on a raft of professional knowledge about effective ways to teach and assess young people with ASN, workshop leaders were given guidance on how to communicate their research in a way that would be accessible to their audience. In addition, other people with relevant expertise, including outdoor activity staff, a storyteller and a professional photographer were employed.

Gathering evaluative data on both the co-creation process and subsequent changes in understanding, beliefs and behaviours from very diverse participants presents methodological challenges. The types of data being considered were especially varied and some of the participants had appreciable difficulties with spoken and written communication. It was, therefore, deemed best, to gather a range of qualitative data from participants. A mixed methods study was conducted, having first obtained ethical approval from the School of Education Ethics Committee. Field notes were written by the Principal Investigator at the end of each of the five days of the summer scheme, including observations of behaviours of young people. In addition, a photographic record of their responses during the project was gathered by a photographer whilst the researcher photographed their outputs in response to open-ended tasks set during the final session of the scheme. Although these methods can be criticised as being ‘high inference’, inferences about the young people’s learning were made in the context of the knowledge of the researcher that was gained from spending five days with them. The analysis was corroborated with school staff who taught the pupils and who had attended to develop their knowledge of how to teach STEM subjects outside a mainstream school setting. All participating university staff were interviewed after the end of the month-long scheme using a semi-structured questionnaire. The interviews were done by video call and, with the interviewees consent, an audio recording was made form which a transcript could be generated. The transcript and subsequent analysis were shared with university staff to ensure the veracity of the interpretation. The collective data will analysed using thematic analysis in which both explicit terms and the meaning conveyed in the phenomena is grouped. This approach is felt to be appropriate for exploring meanings across a highly varied body of data and across an especially diverse body of participants.

Preliminary findings are that all those involved derived benefit from their involvement in the scheme. Interview data from STEM academics showed that they positively of the impact of their involvement on their profile & that of their discipline. They also indicated that they had been pleased to extend their experience of working with a lay audience and were impressed with the laterality of thought and high level of engagement of the young people; they did not perceive them as ‘hard to reach’. They also valued the chance to meet colleagues whom they had not known previously, especially those in different faculties to them. They also found it very helpful to devise their activities in conjunction with the education staff and had been prompted to re-think their ideas about teaching & learning. The young people demonstrated their understanding of sustainability through several open-ended activities run during the last day. During these, many demonstrated a strong affective response to protecting their environment and some understood that sustainability involves environmental stability over a long period of time. They were all able to evaluate the relative contributions of different actions to achieving sustainability and the role of human behaviour in promoting sustainability. Several benefits of co-creation as an approach to epistemology emerged during the preliminary scrutiny of the data. Firstly, putting people into a context that is novel to both means that both sides have a genuine contribution to make to the development of others. A high level of empathy for other participants and mutual support emerged in both comments and behaviours; this extended beyond the young people’s friendship groups. Co-creation also appeared to reduce the risk of 'lazy stereotyping', a key finding in a discipline like STEM that tends to be elitists and from which many find themselves excluded (Archer et al., 2012).

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