NSF funding supports community education for blizzard preparedness

For Noemi Waight, associate professor of science education in the Department of Learning and Instruction, Graduate School of Education, teaching isn’t just for students enrolled in her courses.

In a current study on “Disaster Justice and Resilience: A Response to the 2022 Buffalo Blizzard,” Waight and her colleagues seek to understand the experiences of Buffalo residents — science teachers, community leaders and members, and families — who were directly and disproportionately impacted by the 2022 Buffalo blizzard. One aspect of this work involves creating a framework for a community-based, science education curriculum to improve disaster resilience in response to the blizzard. Waight hopes to expand public knowledge, and facilitate family and community discussions about disaster preparation and the social inequalities of climate hazards.

The project, currently in the curriculum-development stage, has received a National Science Foundation RAPID grant, a program designed to fund research to address an immediate problem, such as the historic 2022 blizzard in Buffalo that claimed the lives of almost 50 people, the majority of whom were Black residents.

“So many times these kinds of disasters are disasters because of the overwhelming context of lack of equity and lack of resources. That’s what really makes it a disaster,” Waight says. “After a disaster, you have technical people come in and study the science of the blizzard or other extreme events, but very rarely do they focus on the human element and, more specifically, the education element of how people learn disaster resilience.”

In the GSE, Waight’s research focuses on understanding how technologies and tools are implemented in classrooms, specifically K-12. The Disaster Justice and Resilience project, which involves interviewing community members and leaders, families and science teachers, seeks to impact how underserved communities are prepared for future extreme events.

“What we’re trying to understand and triangulate is how people understand these kinds of phenomena, what are their sources of information, and how they prepare for these events?” she explains. It is also important, she says, for residents to understand how existing inequalities exacerbate how these extreme events manifest in their communities.

There is also an element of advocacy in this study.

Waight seeks to inform community members by expanding disaster justice and resilience knowledge in the classroom to better prepare the next generation of adults who may have to prepare for disasters in the future. Also, she says kids can help inform adults, their parents and families, and communities about these events. In the case of the blizzard — where widespread loss of power caused loss of life — students would learn how to stay warm without heat, and help explain the science of blizzards with their parents if future disasters arise.

“We can no longer teach about blizzards in Buffalo without addressing the humanistic aspect of the event: that there was loss of life and that there’s a context now that’s directly related to our city,” she says.

Until this point, Waight notes, there has been little work done in the U.S. regarding disaster education in K-12 and community learning. While there is disaster education around the phenomena itself in science classes, teachers are not addressing the human element of disasters in the classroom, she adds.

“We’re very thankful to the NSF because this RAPID grant has been instrumental and of great support to conduct community-engaged research. It allowed us to incentivize community involvement and expand the scope of the project,” Waight says.

She says the project would not have come about without the involvement of Wonyong Park, associate professor at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom and co-principal investigator with Waight on the grant. Park’s research focuses on disaster education in South Korea and the UK.

“I spent a lot of time learning about Buffalo’s industrial history, as well as its troubled history of race and class, and interacting with residents and activist groups because current events cannot be separated from the socio-historical context of the community,” Park says. “Disaster is still a new research agenda for education researchers, just as K-12 education is an uncharted area for disaster researchers. These experiences have allowed me to see the similarities and patterns of injustice between the 2022 Buffalo blizzard and other disasters around the world.”

A key area of researching the human element of disaster education is interdisciplinary, as well as intercontinental perspectives.

Additional researchers from UB involved in the project include Christopher St. Vil, associate professor in the School of Social Work; Jennifer Tripp, postdoctoral associate in the GSE; and Fatemeh Mozaffari, a graduate student in language education in the Department of Learning & Instruction.

Within the coming months, a science education curriculum framework will be developed to broaden the participation of urban science teachers serving approximately 500 K-12 students in schools that were impacted by the blizzard, as well as Black and Brown community leaders working in youth services, public health, climate justice, food insecurity and equitable mobility organizations, and Black and Brown families living in communities most impacted by the blizzard.

“I hope that our project will remind people, especially policymakers, of the critical role of education in remembering disasters, recovering from them and building a more just society,” Park says. “There are still dozens — perhaps more — people in Buffalo who have lost loved ones or experienced traumatic times themselves. Their stories should not be forgotten.

“Disaster education should focus on developing students who can see, question and disrupt the injustices that disasters like the blizzard of 2022 exposed.”

As a faculty member, Waight hopes this research helps bridge the gap between how research informs real scenarios in the community and provides a framework for future community-based research projects to address other social inequities.

“Our hope is that this research will provide some advocacy and a blueprint for the city of Buffalo with programs that need to be in place every winter, in case of an extreme event,” she says.