Insights for Building Community Resilience from Prioritizing Youth in Environmental Change Research

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Resilience intergenerational learning

This is an interesting case and potentially interesting study. I would ask the authors to write in more straightforward research journal article style, with more specificity about research questions and connections between those questions, the lit review, methods, and results. There are several areas of confusion as I indicate below.

Introduction.

I am not clear what the research is perhaps because there appear to be multiple levels of research going on. I think this was a participatory research process with youth and elders, although not clear what is meant by “community team.” I think it is also research about the participatory research process. Pls clear up use of research and make it clear what the paper is about.

Last sentence of intro leaves reader hanging. Do you mean to see that the framework emerged out of the research –so this is a sort of grounded theory project?

 

Lit rev

Not sure what this sentence means. ” Knowledge, skills, and ethical behaviours in place-based communities can illustrate how we

104 ground these strands together in meaningful and effective ways through practice”   The overwhelming majority of env education and related research suggests that knowledge does not lead to env behaviors—not sure if that is an assumption behind this statement

Can you make it clear when you are citing research and when you are citing more “opinion” type articles? Which articles are specifically about indigenous communities and which more generally about intergenerational learning? Are you making the case that intergenerational learning in indigenous communities differs from intergen learning in other communities, and if so how and what is your evidence? (and is this contemporary indigenous communities or indigenous communities prior to massive disruption by western society)?

 

Methods

Pls state the goal of the research and specific research questions or objectives.

Pls have one subsection on participants.

Pls have separate subsection on intervention (what you call activities but includes a lot of information on participants.) What did participants do ---not so much on what they wrote in their applications.

Include a section on research methods—how do your sources of data address your research questions?

Include separate section on analysis. More details on coding. Was coding of interviews done by multiple people until they agreed?

If your outcomes are transformative learning, pls incorporate this into the lit rev. What do we know about transformative learning, what don’t we know,  and how does this research project fill the gaps in what we don’t know? Make a connection with intergenerational learning, participatory research, and indigenous knowledge/context.

Pls make clear how the Riemer framework relates to research question and data from interviews (e.g., about definition of delta). If youth interviewed elders, then how do their interview data address questions about transformative learning?

 

Results—

the details about festival etc should go in methods

generally with qualitative coding and methods you want to present data as themes and quotes that emerge from the data and not using bar charts—in short, the methodological paradigms for qualitative and quantitative research generally should not be integrated in the results. Qualitative is for deep understanding, not simple codes or counting codes.

 

Discussion

Make sure in discussion you stick to new insights and your contributions and do NOT include anything you could have said prior to the research (e.g., last paragraph).

 

 

Author Response

Thank you for your criticisms of our manuscript and corresponding recommendations for its improvement. Overall, we have strived to clarify what the research was about. Your recommendations went a long way in helping us cultivate that clarity.

We believe we achieve this clarity in three major ways. First, we added most of the subsections you recommended:

·      Explicit statement of research objectives and goals (p. 2, line 72: Research Purpose and Objectives);

·      Subsection that details who participants are (p. 7, line 257: Participants);

·      Subsection on interventions that detail what participants did rather than how they came to be a part of the research (p. 7, line 266: Interventions); and

·      Subsection on analysis that clearly identifies how coding was conducted (p. 7, line 291: Analyses).

Second, we were more explicit about how the research objectives corresponded with gaps in the literature. We added a subsection, Conceptual Framework (p. 2, lines 85 to 180).  In this section, we described the framework used to guide the design and assessment of our methodological process (p. 2, lines 85 to 91; see Figure 1).  In the conceptual framework, each subsection includes a description of the gaps in literature that our findings address. Third, we clarified how our assessment was linked to our research objectives using criteria from Reimer et al. (2014) and Mezirow (1994), as for example in Table 1 (p. 9, line 180). Then, we adjusted the section headers, subsection headers, and topic sentences to clearly demarcate where we present results and findings related to our research objectives.

In addition to recommended major revisions, we address several highlighted minor revisions:

·      We adjusted section and subsection headings to reflect a more straightforward manuscript style;

·      We revised referent language to researchers in this study from the Charlebois Community School from ‘community team members’ to ‘leaders from the Charlebois Community School’ and then ‘school leaders’ in subsequent references (e.g., p. 7, lines 233 to 237);

·      We provided descriptions about how this was a participatory study and related that back to our conceptual framework (p. 7, lines 233 to 256).

·      In several instances, we clarified the nature of references being cited. Two examples include when we identified when we drew from literature that referenced research in Indigenous community settings (e.g., p. 3, lines 115 to 118), and from systematic literature relating to intergenerational engagement and learning (e.g., p. 3, lines 121 to 123);

·      We moved details on the local festival from the results section to the methodology section;

·      We removed several unclear sentences throughout the manuscript and one extraneous paragraph from the discussion that were flagged in your review; and

·      We removed results that reflected blended quantitative and qualitative paradigms, as for example with the bar charts that counted codes. Instead, we re-articulated those findings into themes.

Reviewer 2 Report

The article describes a project involving young people in research on long-term sustainability of place-based communities in order to learn about the potential for engagement and learning. The students were engaged in interviewing older people on their perspectives on socio-ecological change. They then were guided in analyzing these interviews and finally reflected on the results and their own learning.

This is an interesting paper insofar as it describes this participatory and learning process and the potentials of involving young people in researching their own communities.

I suggest two major revisions:

1

The paper falls short in describing the socio-ecological change in the Saskatchewan River Delta. Which changes have occurred or are expected to occur regarding water development, climate change and colonization?

The authors can add this information in the paper and relate these findings to the perspectives of young and older people of the community. Or they focus on the description of the learning process and change the title and text accordingly, maybe even think of submitting to another section or journal.

 

2

The paper describes the research process involving young people and what they learn about their changes in their river delta on the one hand and on the other hand what can be learned by engaging or even prioritizing youth. These two aspects should be described as such and the results and discussion have to focus on and distinguish both levels of research.

Using the learning model of Reimer is a good starting point, but I miss the conclusions drawn from using it.

Author Response

Thank you for your feedback on our manuscript. After reflecting on your comments, we agreed that the main thrust of the manuscript was not clear. We appreciated how you clarified two pathways to revise it. We chose to emphasize the evaluation of youth engagement and learning with older persons in community as this theme fit our original intention, data collection procedures, and findings.

To ensure clarity on this theme, we altered the title along with significant portions of the text. We have introduced in a new section, Conceptual Framework, which explains how each aspect of the research relates to one another, and highlights gaps in resilience and intergenerational engagement and learning literatures (p. 2 to 5). Then, we organized the results and discussion to address those gaps. We believe that the conclusions are clearer now from applying the conceptual framework using Reimer et al. (2014) and Mezirow (1994).

Although we have made considerable changes to the manuscript, we do feel it remains a good fit for the current section/journal. In particular, we feel our manuscript responds to the section’s emphasis on integrating knowledge across practice and theory to understand human interactions (i.e., youth engagement and learning) with social-ecological systems (i.e., the intergeneration transmission of knowledge and values related to change in the Saskatchewan River Delta, Canada).

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Thanks, the title and intention of the paper are much clearer and structured better now. The link to environmental research is still weak. I am sure you have a lot of findings on water conditions and environmental change in the delta, but you do not describe these findings. Please elaborate on these findings, which are shown only in Appendix A.

 

Further changes requested:

L 33: please define “ethical citizen”

L 51, 67: one author of this paper explains – why do you write this? Is it a statement, which is not shared by the team of authors? Or is it his / her special expertise in another role than being co-researcher and co-author? If this is the case, please specify this role and reflect upon it.

L 96

To create intergenerational engagement that was meaningful for youth we leveraged the concept, ‘community resilience’.

I am not a native speaker, but leverage seems a very strong verb here, as you merely apply the concept.

No comma needed.

You change between using quotation marks for “community resilience” and not using them? What do you want to say? Do you want to stress your genuine combination of other concepts? Or do you rely on former research citing it?

L 128: which two examples show what exactly?

L 138:

What is western resilience theory? Please specify what you mean by contrasting “western” to “land-based” or other contrasting concepts, like for example L 222: delta knowledge and western science curricula.

L 156 ff:

Reflexivity is an important feature in social anthropology (Foucault, Clifford, Geertz, ….) and in inter-and transdisciplinary studies (Zienkowksi 2017, Fortuin 2016, …) as well.

L 129-161:

What do you want to say? Not common but enriching?

L 197

What do you mean with “resource development coloniazion”. Maybe better start the sentence with hydrodevelopment.

L 204

Can you cite data on declining wildlife abundance and harvest rates?

L 208

How has climate change affected subsistence? And how knowledge transfer?

L 208: delete “have”

L 209:

Which processes of colonization?

L 246:

Please specify which changes hav occurred, when describing the cooperation between school leaders and researchers.

L 297:

How did school leaders verify the analysis?

L 306:

I do not understand this sentence.

L 402: please specify what are “rights holders”.

L 406-409:

What do you mean with “health as an important meaning of the delta”? Do you refer to human health or a functioning ecosystem? Please specify.

L 417-420

This is an important result. You can discuss this.

L 449: what is a “two-exchange”?

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx