As a result of outcomes from F4R Cohorts 1 and 2 and NAU graduate student engagements to date, the F4R Curriculum will be completed for both citizen engagement as well as a University student structure.
F4R News Bytes is an interview series with Sean Ryan, F4R, Professional Development Coordinator for the NAU Center for Science Teaching & Learning. This byte was from an interview on 6/17/20.
The data collection in visualization tools have neared a point of completion to make community engagement and data collection more active and accessible. One goal in developing these data collection tools was to make them universal through a spreadsheet version that can be used across a variety of mapping or visualization platforms, e.g., the FEW-View Tool; a FEMA-based tool that focuses on resilience analysis planning and looks at many of the key locations of resources and infrastructure that are publicly available; and a PolicyMap tool that provides an opportunity for people to better understand demographics, economics, and quality of life indicators for their community.
What do next steps look like for F4R? The citizens that have been involved in the pilot development in Cohorts 1 and 2 have really helped to guide us on a pathway where the F4R program can become accessible for other communities.
We plan to release reports for the Food, Energy, and Water for Flagstaff as a Pilot Community this Fall. If there are prior volunteers or additional volunteers that would like to be involved in one of the current efforts, including those to address COVID needs, there will be outreach for a 3.0 cohort. We envision that they could be part of a training and implementation hub, assisting in the delivery of virtual classrooms to meet needs that often aren’t overcome with dispersed or rural communities across the United States.
For example, Port Angeles in the state of Washington on the Olympic Peninsula has moved forward, looking to pilot the materials that are being completed now. We started a virtual training process with them to get them started with their first citizen cohort but that had to be put on hold in the midst of COVID-19.