Youth Sports Coaches and their Community in Air Pollution Governance

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research.

NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields.

Under the sponsorship of Dr. Kim Fortun at the University of California, Irvine, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist’s investigation of the effects of air pollution on youth sports coaching practices and pedagogical development. Exposure to air pollution during childhood has significant destructive effects on health and well-being, both short and long-term.

K–12 students in marginalized communities often suffer disproportionally from exposure to airborne hazards. School staff members, especially sports coaches, are well positioned to mitigate children’s exposure to air pollution through their decisions of when, where, and how to exercise. Yet most coaches are inadequately prepared to address such environmental hazards.

This project helps education policymakers and curriculum development professionals dramatically improve their accounting of situated environmental hazards in diverse school settings by giving them access to real-time data. In particular, it focuses on providing working class, minority, and immigrant communities with such data. For while such communities are often the subject of pollution-related research, they are seldom invited to give input during basic data collection—even though they are particularly well positioned and stand to benefit the most.

This project develops a new line of research that theorizes coaches as air pollution actors in their everyday activities. Such innovation is possible by using participatory action research design elements and leading community-engaged, environmental justice-oriented research approaches.

The proposed project, “Youth Sports Coaches and their Community in Air Pollution Governance,” will study the daily decision making and pedagogical choices of school sports coaches at a local public school, and its surrounding neighborhood, in the San Gabriel Valley, California, a region with significant air pollution given its proximity to numerous major highways. The project objectives are (1) to collect, organize, and map empirical data on pollution research and governance; (2) to collect interview data from stakeholders; (3) to collect air pollution data through monitoring devices; (4) to develop a multi-scalar theoretical framework to characterize pollution governance; (5) to develop a freeway and transportation corridor archive.

The study will employ emerging Urban Humanities methods, ethnographic observations, interviews, archival research, and air quality monitoring data to produce original data sets finely attuned to localized experiences of school coaches. Stakeholder coaches will wear, and neighbors will install, air pollution monitoring devices, and will learn how to access and understand the generated data via smartphone applications.

Outcomes include developing maps and other visualizations of the daily activities of coaches on school grounds, situating their pedagogic decisions vis-à-vis the pollution governance infrastructures of school, city, and state. A broader impact of this project is the development of guides for sports coaches and community stakeholders to understand and communicate effectively about air pollution hazards.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.