It is a daunting to be asked to chair a committee for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. You are around the table with a room full of exceptionally smart people, at least one with a Nobel Prize, and taking your place inside an institution that stretches back to Abraham Lincoln. You must leverage all the voices and intellect in the room while also recognizing the voices and histories that are not in the room. Working with the committee, you strive to answer concisely a narrowly scoped charge while simultaneously unpacking the larger issues implicit in that charge. As chair, you aim for a consensus that is not overly obvious by exploring the boundaries of agreement and even flirting with disagreement, because that is where the meaningful parts of consensus lies. In the final product, your report, you aim to say something new without getting too far ahead of the evidence; something that is small enough to be precise, but big enough to inspire.

Thankfully, you have the processes of the National Academies and the people on the committee to guide you. The process is designed to keep you focused on the topic and restrained by available evidence: Our committee joked that we were not able to use the word “is” without a citation. There were times in our process that this demand for evidence was frustrating: Sometimes we wanted to make a point about the way we would like things to be, engage in a speculative line of reasoning, or take an idea about education in citizen science and tease out its broader implications. In each case, though, an insistence on evidence and scope (often with some gentle or not-so-gentle guidance from the National Academies staff) brought us back to our task.

The committee, especially in its willingness to respectfully pursue and reach consensus, also helped illuminate the way. Evidence might be the raw material of this report, but it was the committee members who built the report from those raw materials. They collected, evaluated, and synthesized the evidence. They served as the (citizen) scientists who collected the evidence, the story-tellers who wove that evidence into coherent narratives, and the arbitrators who evaluated the evidence to produce findings and recommendations. They were good scientists because they were experts in their fields and listened carefully to our many invited guests; they were good story-tellers because they could pull from and synthesize evidence across a range of disciplines and experiences; and they were good arbitrators because, to the person, they cared more about producing the best answer than they did about proving themselves right.

One of the findings of the report is that the positive social interactions that are part of strong citizen science projects reinforce and create opportunities for learning. This was evident in our committee as well: We had fun together and we got to know one another, and those positive experiences helped us wrestle with necessary and productive disagreement. Learning, it turns out, involves not only new knowledge but also the integration of new and old knowledge and this process sometimes involves deconstructing some of that old knowledge. That part can be painful, especially in academic circles where knowledge is the currency of the realm, and the fact that we had fun together and trusted one another enabled necessary deconstruction. Excellent meals together helped as well.

The committee itself, along with National Academies staff, also represented one of the other findings of the report: people learn more and perform better in environments that welcome and integrate a diversity of experiences and perspectives. They were also, fittingly for a report on education, excellent teachers and learners. I learned as much about the science and practice of teaching and learning from watching them work together as I did from the evidence cited in the report. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work with everyone on the committee and the staff at the National Academies, and richer for having done so.

At the end of the day, a National Academies report is an integrative summary of what is known about a single topic: These reports are expansive, complete, and up to date about what is known, and reflective of what is possible. Our report, like all National Academies reports, is not meant to move the field forward as much as it is meant to provide a solid way-point from which the field can move forward. We believe it is an important document. We aim to provide a common reference of strongly supported understandings that can be a driver for further innovation and creativity and for iteration and refinement by citizen science researchers, designers, educators, and participants. I hope, though I suspect it is impossible, that you can learn as much from this report, have as much fun thinking about its big ideas, and find as many new ways of doing things, as I did in working with the committee and staff at the National Academies to produce the report.

Finally, some of the most exciting ideas discussed by our committee never made it to the final report. Although these ideas are not up to the standards of the report and go well beyond the scope of our charge, they are compelling. For me, the emergent line of reasoning goes like this: Effective citizen science projects create a kind of negotiated space where scientists and nonscientists can work well together. That means the most effective citizen science projects create a space where all people are considered intellectual partners and contributors. In this way, they offer a vehicle to challenge historic, and unproductive, divisions between those who are part of science and those who are not. They become places to expand participation in science not only by inviting people to do science, but also by inviting communities to use science in service of their goals and priorities. Citizen science poses questions about who participates in science, what it means to participate in science, who gets to decide what scientific questions to investigate, and even what kind of knowledge and practice count as science.

Raj Pandya

Chair, Committee on Designing Citizen Science to Support Science Learning