Freshwater-focused place-based education uses the tools of place-based education to cultivate environmental literacy, including the capacity for stewardship of lakes, rivers, streams, and other bodies of fresh water. Freshwater PBE, like all PBE, is a powerful strategy for connecting K-12 schools with the communities they serve-for the benefit of both.
This playbook chapter provides guidance and resources as schools consider, "How can we establish a persistent practice of place-based education focused on freshwater resources and stewardship?" This chapter is best read after or in combination with other playbook chapters, including the overview of place-based education and the chapters on professional development, school-community partnerships, and supportive school policies.
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Overview |
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Administration: Through their efforts related to budgeting, school policy, and instructional practices, administrators can provide critical support for the practice of place-based education.
Educators: Educators looking for opportunities for students to learn in and contribute to the community may be interested in freshwater topics.
Community: Nonprofits, municipalities, universities, businesses, and more may be interested in examples of how they can partner with schools to foster stewardship of fresh water and build awareness of its many uses.
As noted by From Students to Stewards, Michigan "is the Great Lakes State. Bordered by four Great Lakes, it has hundreds of miles of freshwater coast, more than 11,000 inland lakes, and thousands of miles of rivers and streams. Michiganders have a deep connection to water through our culture, economy, and way of life." Nevertheless, "Many Michigan residents lack basic knowledge about the Great Lakes, watersheds, and how water resources are directly affected by the decisions and actions of people."
These truths make freshwater PBE an exceptionally good fit for place-based education in Michigan. Most schools will have access to a lake, stream, or river within reasonable traveling distance. Organizations that work to protect fresh water, or who rely upon it for economic or cultural uses, are abundant, and can serve as community partners in freshwater PBE. And water is an essential topic of study for students of all ages, prominent in science and social studies curricula, and an ideal focus for applied writing, communication, calculation, and engineering tasks.
A complete freshwater PBE effort consists of some version of each of the following steps. They may or may not be carried out in the order listed; often research, partnerships, and development of an action project are occurring simultaneously.
Please note: the depth and duration of your freshwater PBE effort will depend on several factors and choices. Some efforts are limited and others are expansive, depending on the experience of the participating teachers and partners, the nature of school policies, and other considerations.
Typically, before you decide on a freshwater focus for your PBE effort, you will have conducted some sort of scan to identify needs that students could address through an action project in the community. The following are just a few of the freshwater issues that students can address through community action projects:
Many teachers will narrow the options down to a few quality choices, then have students use tools for decision-making that help them establish evaluation criteria and choose among the options systematically. Sometimes, teachers identify a focus for place-based education on their own or with a community partner, letting their required curriculum drive the choice. However you go about selecting an issue, the balance of this chapter assumes that you've decided to focus on freshwater stewardship.
Community partners play essential roles in place-based education. Sometimes, a partner is engaged from the start and helps teachers and students identify community stewardship needs, especially those that are well suited to student-led work. Sometimes, a partner is engaged after teachers and students have selected a focus for their work, and contributes specific local knowledge related to freshwater resources. Community partners often help students understand career paths related to natural resources and environmental sustainability, which can involve employment in private industry, government, education, or the nonprofit sectors. See our chapter on school-community partnerships for further insight into the process of developing healthy school-community partnerships, the various roles community partners can play, and more.
Partners for a freshwater stewardship effort can be found in many places:
The Office of the Great Lakes within the Michigan Department of Energy, Great Lakes, and Environment has developed a partner database that lists a variety of organizations offering direct support and/or resources related to freshwater stewardship education.
Connect to curriculum. A well-designed freshwater PBE effort includes some components aimed at building academic understanding and some components aimed at tangibly serving or enhancing the community's freshwater resources. Such an effort will address multiple elements within a teacher's required curriculum. If teachers did not select a project based solely on curriculum standards, they should now identify a set of standards that can be addressed through the freshwater PBE effort.
Teachers of elementary students can often organize comprehensive, interdisciplinary explorations that include freshwater science; address the politics, geography, or historical aspects of local fresh water; and involve applications of math and of reading, writing, listening, and public speaking. Secondary teachers often face more difficulty in collaborating across disciplines, but students benefit from richer and more meaningful learning experiences when teachers work together to integrate cross-disciplinary content into a substantial effort with real-world relevance and complexity.
Articulate an essential or driving question. Once teachers have identified the standards they want to incorporate into the emerging freshwater PBE effort, they generally articulate a driving or essential question. As described by the Lake Champlain program, an essential question is "more 'real' than just topics." Essential questions "take hold when the learner grapples with real problems and perplexities of the places in which we live." These questions structure the project's core inquiry, and will ideally reflect topics that have sparked students' curiosity or inspired them to action.
Develop learning tasks to navigate the inquiry. Through various individual or group assignments, students may:
Community partners can help students (and their teachers) grapple with new material, collect scientific data, bring questions or findings to public officials, and understand the nuances of local freshwater stewardship.
Use your learning to define the best stewardship actions-and take them. Stewardship action projects provide further opportunities to develop skills and competencies prominent in Michigan's curriculum standards. For example, students can engineer solutions to stormwater runoff problems, using science and engineering practices including defining problems, developing and using models, and designing solutions. Students can take informed civic action by approaching elected or appointed officials or convening a community meeting to discuss an issue. And, through their work as members of a team and in partnership with teachers and community, students can develop their speaking and listening skills, organizational and leadership attributes, and other capacities associated with readiness for college and careers.
Sharing results and celebrating accomplishments is not only about fun (although it can be fun). Research on the benefits of place-based education emphasizes the importance of student accountability to authentic audiences and recognition for student contributions. When students feel accountable to members of the community who have expressed a need for their help on a specific community issue, they are motivated to persist and engage deeply with the issue. When students are recognized for their contributions to the community, they begin to see themselves as competent contributors and stewards who can make a difference. Both outcomes are core benefits of place-based freshwater education.
Sharing results can be done in many different and creative ways. Whenever possible, students should present their work to live audiences so they can be recognized and appreciated. Consider a presentation to the community-partner organization(s) or to the municipal governing board, or at the project site where relevant. Some PBE practitioners host conference-style events at which multiple student groups can present their work to a diverse audience.
When a school has a strong freshwater PBE practice, freshwater PBE is part of the regular operation and culture of the school:
When schools begin to achieve the types of changes listed above, freshwater PBE becomes part of the culture: an expectation of families, teachers, and community members, and a core instructional strategy well understood by district staff and leadership. See the examples in this document of grantees of From Students to Stewards, each of which has a unique program of freshwater PBE that fits the local school and draws on local environmental needs and partners.
At this stage, some schools commit to long-term, recurring projects that define their approaches in each of their grade bands or subject areas. For example, an elementary school with a suitable nearby stream and stormwater infrastructure might engage fifth-grade students in water quality testing and related stewardship actions, engage fourth-grade students in stenciling stormwater drains in community neighborhoods, rely on second and third grade students to be stewards of the in-school recycling and composting programs, and work with kindergarteners and first graders to maintain native plant beds and rain gardens on campus. Teachers at each grade level can integrate English language arts, math, social studies, and science standards and practices into their freshwater work. As students advance in age and grade, they accumulate a sequence of freshwater stewardship experiences and meet a variety of people from the community who play different roles and have different careers related to water.
Schools in other types of communities might field quite different types of long-term projects, depending on their local freshwater resources and mix of local organizations with freshwater knowledge and interest in partnership. And some schools with strong, established freshwater PBE practices do not have recurring, long-term projects. Instead, their practice emphasizes student voice and choice and results in novel freshwater PBE efforts each year. These schools develop advanced pedagogical practices in support of democratic decision-making, and have the types of flexible policies that allow students and teachers to seek out the projects of greatest local value and interest.
Regardless of the form taken by freshwater PBE in a school, students benefit when they have multiple, rigorous, and authentic freshwater PBE experiences over their years of learning; are given the opportunity to engage in real and substantive local issues and to make meaningful contributions; and are publicly acknowledged for their work. When it has these attributes, freshwater PBE helps students see themselves as capable and responsible members of the community with ideas and skills of merit and value.
There are many schools with one or two teachers leading freshwater place-based education efforts. These teachers are often inclined by personality or training to experiential, student-led teaching and learning and to outdoor recreation or environmentalism. Their interest in the natural world and desire to offer hands-on, authentic learning in the community drives them to overcome barriers and acquire the necessary knowledge, tools, and resources.
For schools and districts to spread freshwater PBE more broadly throughout a school, they will have to attend to the policies and structures in the school that support or constrain freshwater PBE. The playbook chapter "Supportive School Policies and Structures" reviews some of the most crucial steps to take and questions to ask.
To make the necessary changes for freshwater PBE to really thrive in a school, administrators may need their own professional learning to help them consider such things as:
Administrators may also need to educate other decision-makers in the district about freshwater PBE.
Authors/Contributors:
Lisa Marckini-Polk
Mary Whitmore