I worked with children aged 8- 11 from the Green Team Science club at a primary school, Vivienne Kuh
and Dr. Rachael Miles

I worked with the children to creatively map what they care about in their local area, and then with the PhD students to explore the area through their lens.

I developed creative ways for the PhD students and the children to work together, in order to find out what the children wanted to measure.

The students made symbols of different aerosols that they predicted they would find and took them (and the maps) to help the Green Team understand what they were looking for.

The Phd students then went and took measurements in the areas the children had identified as important.

I worked with the findings, developing costumes that communicated the results creatively and tapped into the local culture actively (since they had put on protests previously and could then use the costumes to ‘Play out’ or organise more street protests).

I worked with the project groups and with local communities more broadly through a series of workshops that invited people to make costumes that explored the project findings. The costumes drew on the aerosol data collected by the project and possible positive actions (such as growing Ivy, Lavender and Margoram in vertical gardens).

In the last phase of the project I co-created a zine with Vivienne Kuh and an 11 year old member of The Green Team that tells the story of the process and shares insights into the successes of making Citizen Science more creative, grass-roots and responsive to context and people’s everyday concerns.