Approaches to citizen science – an indispensable means of combining ecological research with environmental education and natural history observation – range from community‐based monitoring to the use of the internet to “crowd‐source” various scientific tasks, from data collection to discovery. With new tools and mechanisms for engaging learners, citizen science pushes the envelope of what ecologists can achieve, both in expanding the potential for spatial ecology research and in supplementing existing, but localized, research programs. The primary impacts of citizen science are seen in biological studies of global climate change, including analyses of phenology, landscape ecology, and macro‐ecology, as well as in sub‐disciplines focused on species (rare and invasive), disease, populations, communities, and ecosystems. Citizen science and the resulting ecological data can be viewed as a public good that is generated through increasingly collaborative tools and resources, while supporting public participation in science and Earth stewardship.

Citizen science has proliferated in the last decade, becoming a critical form of public engagement in science and an increasingly important research tool for the study of large-scale patterns in nature. Although citizen science is already interdisciplinary, it has untapped potential to build capacity for transformative research on coupled human and natural systems. New tools have begun to collect paired ecological and social data from the same individual; this allows for detailed examination of feedbacks at the level of individuals and potentially provides much-needed data for agent-based modeling. With the ongoing professionalization of citizen science, the field can benefit from integrating a coupled systems perspective, including a broadening of the social science perspectives considered. This can lead to new schema and platforms to increase support for large-scale research on coupled natural and human systems.

This article is intended to spark a discussion between two research communities—scholars who study learning and scholars who study educational organizations. A secondary purpose is to encourage researchers to look beyond schools to examine learning in other types of educational organizations. The authors outline a framework to guide research on the relationship between learning and the social contexts afforded by formal organizations. The framework combines elements of cultural historical activity theory, a sociocultural theory of learning, and institutional theory, which is a constructivist theory of organization. The authors employ preliminary findings from research and secondary historical accounts to illustrate the potential of the framework for guiding research that ties learning to contexts in formal organizations.

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