2026 Theses Doctoral

Bridging Science and Activism: Investigating the Intersection of Science Education and the Youth-led Climate Movement

Torres, Christina A.

Climate change is a socioscientific crisis that is simultaneously scientific, moral, political, and lived. Knowledge to action assumptions are inadequate for explaining how climate participation develops. Individuals may hold sophisticated scientific understandings without participating in climate action, while others deeply engage in action through pathways shaped by identity, legitimacy, emotion, and institutional opportunity.

This dissertation addresses how youth climate activism can be understood as a site of learning in which youth become particular kinds of climate knowers and actors, and what this reality reveals about education in the face of the climate crisis.

This qualitative research study examined ten youth climate activists in New York City. Data were collected in 2025 through three semi-structured interviews with each participant, including a structured concept mapping exercise in which participants constructed maps anchored by “climate change,” “climate crisis,” and “climate action.” Interviews elicited participants’ pathways into climate activism, science related experiences, action portfolios, and experiences of recognition and constraint across school, civic, organizational, and community contexts. Concept mapping was used to externalize how participants structured their understanding of climate as a system, including causal relationships, scope and boundaries, and epistemic resources. Analysis proceeded through an iterative coding process and cross-case comparison, producing two analytical typologies and a synthesis that examined patterns of convergence and divergence between identity configurations and structures of climate understanding.

The study concludes that youth climate activism is best understood as epistemic and identity work, not merely a behavior. Analysis of interviews produced an identity to action typology consisting of STEM Builders, Arts Advocates, Civic Educators, and Justice Organizers, demonstrating that science functions differently across youth participation: as an identity anchor, communicative tool, credibility language, or as necessary but insufficient evidence within broader justice frames.

New York City’s infrastructure enabled multiple pathways into climate participation while also stratifying access. Analysis of concept maps as mental models produced a typology consisting of Science-to-Solutions Systems Builders, Lived Experience Sensemakers, Institutional Leverage Modelers, and Epistemic Justice and Decolonial Thinkers, demonstrating differences in how youth organized climate change as systems and where they located pathways for action.

The cross-case synthesis elaborated that identity and understanding coevolve through participation trajectories shaped by recognition, institutional constraints, and access to experiences. This connection between identity and understanding, however, is by no means a one-to-one relationship; this analysis sheds light on convergence, mismatch, and hybridity across the typologies. These findings suggest that climate change education should move beyond content coverage to cultivate structured sensemaking, evidence based reasoning, and public facing scientific practices, while expanding equitable access to meaningful participation pathways that support youth as climate knowers and actors.