In 2025, the Global One Health Academy announced the launch of the Local Engagement Seed Grants to support NC State students, postdocs, faculty, and staff in their One Health-relevant local engagement projects. Kathryn Stevenson (CNR), was a recipient of the 2025 Local Engagement Seed Grant Awards for a project on designing a co-produced resilience education program. Learn more about Stevenson and how the Global One Health Academy helped support her research on resilience education through her spotlight below.
What is your lab’s research focus?
We research children and nature. We are interested in how experiences in nature can support children’s learning and development, as well as foster a sense of care. We are also interested in supporting children and youth to engage in their communities to support a more sustainable and resilient future that includes their priorities and vision. We often do this through working with teachers and schools, as a mechanism for broad and diverse impact.
How does your research relate to the One Health framework?
The interdisciplinary and interconnectivity approach of One Health directly relates to ours, as we emphasize the reciprocal relationship between human health and environmental health. Our most recent project takes an interdisciplinary approach to resilience education. Resilience to modern challenges – like more extreme weather – require an integrated approach. For example, a hurricane damages ecosystems, nature-based industries, and community infrastructure and triggers community and individual trauma. We are using stories of resilience in nature to help students understand how to support their own resilience and that of their communities. This approach attempts to help students make connections between themselves and their environment and understand that health challenges, and many solutions, are linked.
You received funding from GOHA for a project researching a co-produced resilience education program. Tell us about this work.
One of the strengths of Ready, Set, Resilience is that teachers are encouraged to breathe life into the resources in ways that work for them. English teachers dive into nature-based resilience fables as text. Science teachers use these fables as ways to illustrate ecology principles. Social studies teachers use the fables to discuss how people and places have adapted to change over time. Art teachers help students develop resilience-themed puppet shows to show to the public. Many teachers practice resilience activities like box breathing or referring to a mood meter as daily practices. This varied approach is wonderful but very difficult to pin down in terms of a priori research questions. The GOHA funding supported us bringing teachers together to construct a shared narrative on the benefits of Ready, Set, Resilience. They also prioritized outcomes they’re seeing in students they would like to explore further, and developed evaluation measures they can use in their classrooms to capture those outcomes. The idea is to have a flexible evaluation system to accompany this flexible curriculum. We will be researching the process, and as it allows, using the evaluation data to tell a larger story of impact on students, teachers, and communities.
Ready, Set, Resilience uses a co-production process, where every step of the research and implementation is driven by community members and facilitated by the scientist, rather than being scientist-led, like we tend to think of for traditional research approaches. Why was a co-production approach important to this project, and how did it help you achieve your goals?
This project began as a response to a community need. Teachers and students in coastal NC needed support after Hurricanes Florence and Dorian and in the midst of COVID. They really needed more mental health support than our environmental education team — the Duke Marine Lab Community Science program and our lab — could provide. We enlisted the help of psychology experts — the Resiliency Solution, ecologists, and educators to think about a central question: what can nature teach us about resiliency? Similar to the parable of the blind men and the elephant, none of us could answer this question fully. We really needed the expertise of scientists, and critically, teachers. Particularly as we were developing something out of the box — interdisciplinary, flexible, and community responsive — we really needed teachers to help us envision how this central idea would work in the classroom. Especially given the extreme challenges of teaching in the wake of major crises, we needed it to work with and for teachers. The result has been beyond anything we could have imagined. We have built a curricular program we are really proud of, and more powerfully, a strong network of teachers and researchers who care for and trust one another. This community of support has been able to learn deeply from one another, support students and communities, and respond to emergent needs, like teachers and communities after Helene. We were able to foster connections between Eastern and Western NC educators immediately after the storm, and provide support in terms of teaching resources as well as personal ones from teachers who had been through something similar.
What do you view as a critical challenge for your field, and how can One Health perspectives and approaches help meet this challenge?
The call for inter- and trans-discplinarity is not particularly new at this point, but I do think it’s increasingly relevant and critical. Current crises are compounding and complex, and we need everyone at the table in terms of disciplines and ways of knowing. In education, I would argue it’s just not enough to be a really good science teacher anymore. Understanding what the humanities, the arts, and students’ everyday lived experiences bring to understanding environmental challenges will help them be prepared to develop and deliver the types of solutions that have staying power. One Health understands that challenges and solutions are best understood as linked across these boundaries, and an all-hands (or all-minds) on deck approach is certainly warranted. I’ve been especially appreciative of the GOHA commitment to community-driven research, positioning communities as equal, or even elevated, partners in those discussions.
Is there a recent or upcoming publication where we can read more about your One Health research?
Yes! Community engaged research can take a lot of time to bear fruit, but we are beginning to. This paper just came out describing more about the development of Ready, Set, Resilience, and benefits teachers see:
- McCollum, A. R., Stevenson, K. T., Tayne, K., DeMattia, E., Jeffs, P., & Busch, K. C. (2025). Educating for psychological, community, and ecological resilience: A case study from North Carolina, USA. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-025-01034-3
- Categories:
