AGU Fall Meeting 2023

This research study explores the integration of social and emotional awareness in teaching about water justice issues through a culturally relevant approach, emphasizing mindfulness of its toll on student empowerment in urban schools.

Learning objectives are often reinforced using news items, governmental data platforms or policy elements to contextualize and justify class contents. This may trigger despair, fear, and other negative feelings of various extent depending on the students’ lived experience and background. Therefore, fostering a mindful learning environment that promotes student empowerment is needed.

While exploring the potential of relying on governmental interactive data platforms and portals to create an authentic learning experience, we, teachers and educators, noted the importance of considering cultural context when addressing water justice concerns. By relying on our personal background, class experiences, literature and theory, we present lessons learned, strategies and recommendations for our peers, to avoid damaging learning experiences, and instead, to inspire, encourage and elevate our students.

We aim to inform educators, policymakers, and parents about the potential benefits of incorporating social and emotional learning in water justice education, while recognizing cultural diversity and promoting student empowerment in urban school settings. By adopting this integral approach, educators can foster a more inclusive, equitable, and mindful learning environment, which encourages students to become active participants in tackling water justice issues in their communities and beyond.

Both water and data knowledge, skills and attitude are essential to pursue a career in environmental science or STEM in general. However, at the middle and high school level, there is a notable lack of learning standards centered on water, whether it relates to water infrastructure, water for irrigation, or notions of potability. Similarly, data literacy remains absent from many learning standards and is yet to be fully integrated in classrooms. In addition, workforce in either field show a limited diversity, translating in a limited visibility of the issues and cultural blindness when it comes to solutions.

In order to address this, we are taking an interdisciplinary approach by introducing open-source data platforms related to water into middle and high school STEM core curriculum. The units of study and project-based learning culminate in a student-centered learning celebratory event. While STEM disciplines drive this interdisciplinary approach, we have also deliberately focused on a career development elective for 9-11 grades and English Language Arts [ELA] for 6 and 7 grades.

In the spring of 2023, the students' experiences have included

1. the use of authentic online directories of job offers from federal agencies and America's Water Work Association,

2. the exploration of USEPA, NYS DEC, and NYC DEP online data platforms regarding water quality in rivers and community water systems,

3. discussions with a policy analyst from NYC Department of Environmental Protection,

4. performing mock interviews and role playing potential career paths

5. presenting their work through research posters that detailed demographics of the current professional profiles of water and data related careers

Initial results reported from educators demonstrate certain key breakthroughs in terms of interest from students both in terms of knowledge acquired and attitudes of curiosity and system level thinking. The approach seems to present numerous advantages to the educators too, as the support of interactive data platforms favor both student-centered learning while fostering lively classroom discussions. Further investigations are necessary to understand if students' interest can be sustained over time, across disciplines to encourage lateral thinking, and beyond the school's walls.

Many high school students in the public school system, especially in struggling schools, seem to think that safe tap water, science, and education in general are not really for them. It is only through open dialogue in the classroom that an educator can quickly assess what students know or have yet to learn, and immediately guide the development of knowledge, skills and behaviors in the direction of the standards.

We investigated how engagement in months-long research that culminated in a science conference at the school could open up dialogue about environmental injustice in our classrooms. Research projects were focused on where our materials come from and their impact on water and topics included key components of the AP curriculum for the Land and Water unit. Students were free to choose from general topics including agriculture, mining, aquaculture, and urbanization. Student and teacher generated questions were used to guide the research and all groups were asked to look at the Tragedy of the Commons within their topic. As a result of students conducting research, classroom discussions around various environmental justice issues naturally arose. Students were able to make connections to local environmental injustices and relate them to some of the national and international issues we were learning about which are tied to the curriculum. A virtual visit to a water treatment plant introduced students to government solutions to anthropogenic environmental catastrophes, specifically Superfund Sites.

Through student driven and teacher guided project work, it was possible to open up dialogue among all members of a classroom that both addresses the curriculum at hand as well as the real social and environmental injustices that students live with and may or may not be fully aware of. A critical part of growing scientifically literate people is the action that inevitably emerges from awareness. Following our rich classroom discussions, students collaboratively synthesized solutions to current environmental issues. This natural progression of ideas deepened student understanding of the content in the classroom and led to overall academic improvement. Most importantly, this will lead to more members of society thinking and acting in more sustainable ways.

The motivation for our project began within the halls of our own school. We realized the poor quality of the water in our school. The water on most occasions came up to be brown, this left students after gym class to be dehydrated and tired throughout the school day. Seeing this occurrence we fought for filtered water fountains throughout our school. This is where our project came in and we explained the benefits of adding this filtered system and the negatives of not adding it. Currently we have one in our school and there are more to fight for throughout New York City and beyond.

To understand the impact of filtered water fountains in New York City public schools on students' health and well-being, we investigated the interactions of Water, Hydration, Physical Activity, and Health. Our starting hypothesis is that proper hydration of students necessitates the access to clean and filtered drinking water to address concerns about tap water quality and safety.

To investigate the validity of our hypothesis, we collected data from 250 participants, including students, parents, teachers, and administrators in a form of a survey organized in three sections 1) Awareness and Perceptions of Water Quality, 2) Importance and Usage, and 3) Perceived Benefits. Some of our questions centered on Health Benefits of Hydration, Impact of Physical Activity on Students, and Promoting Healthy Lifestyle Habits.

The results showed that a good amount of people were aware of the benefits of filtered water and its impact on health. The majority believed that filtered water is healthier and improved student hydration, focus, and overall well-being. It also showed the importance of investing in filtered water infrastructure in schools to provide clean, safe, and high-quality drinking water.

The project leads us to advocate for the installation of filtered water fountains in all NYC public schools to promote the health and well-being of students.

Water drinking issues are prevalent across the US. Regulations violations such as the lead issues in Flint (MI), the aging water infrastructure and its vulnerability to climate such as in Jackson (MS), or the presence of new unregulated health threats such as nanoplastics or forever chemicals are making the headlines. The general population, including children, is not equipped to understand the health risks they are exposed to when drinking water. This is not surprising as there is a gap in learning standards when it comes to water in general, and tap water in particular. Making an informed decision about drinking water, from tap or bottle, filtered or not, requires knowledge of hydrology, engineering, policy and regulations, health, data literacy and overall critical thinking.

Our research objective is to propose learning standards, curriculum and class activities on the potability of tap water. To achieve this, scientists specializing in water infrastructure, public health, education and data, are working in close collaborations with teachers at the middle and high school in living environment, mathematics, physical education, and ELA, thus covering the many expertise necessary to tackle water issues.

The project’s outputs are class objectives, syllabus, and activities forming a complete interdisciplinary teaching unit that can be followed by a single course or as a coherent whole, across classes. We present our initial results, comprising a directory of institutional data platforms, testing and monitoring activities, and filter experiments to support the objective. Initial observations from in-class experiences conducted by the teachers are reported.

Beyond the classroom, we are hoping that students will feel empowered when it comes to safe drinking water and thus apt at looking-up information, establishing filtering needs, and mitigating health harm. A secondary objective of the course is to encourage joining the water workforce and address its lack of diversity through a culturally adapted curriculum mindful of abilities. The proposed approach aims to inform policies at the city, state and national level on water education, but also on addressing, holistically, water issues within schools.