FASTLY - Faith & Science Teaching

Follow the Raindrop

In Brief

This activity engages students in physically exploring the path taken by rainwater as it travels across school property, and asks them to consider the pollutants it gathers and their effects downstream. It encourages students to reflect on questions concerning our responsibility for pollutants and their effects on others.

Goals

Students will understand how stormwater runoff affects local creeks and streams.

Students will reflect on how responsibility towards others intersects with stormwater concepts.

Thinking Ahead

Use online maps or other map resources to view the landscape around your school parking lot to learn for yourself where water goes when it rains on your school property, and where water runs when it enters the storm drains. Figure out where the drainpipe leads, and follow that until you find a low-lying area or waterway. Often on maps you can locate the nearest creek, and that can be indicative. You could assign this as research for the students, as well, or let them figure it out with you as you go. You can check with your local municipality to find out if stormwater is handled in some way other than by piping it directly into streams.

Preparing the Activity

Needed:

• Wet weather clothing

Teaching the Activity

Dress for the weather (rainy days can be very useful for this activity!) and take students out into the school parking lot. Draw students’ attention to the parking lot surface and ask them to suggest all the pollutants that might accumulate on it:

• Dirt
• Salt
• Metal dust from cars
• Antifreeze
• Oil and other chemicals from cars
• Heat from the sun

Discuss with them how all of those things get picked up with the stormwater when it rains.

Next, ask where the water goes when it rains, and if it is raining, observe with the students any visible flow patterns.

Physically walk with the students to the storm drain. Then either by your best guess or on the basis of research, follow that pipe downhill and out to the next waterway. As you walk, ask students for observations about the way the land is used. Does the water pass homes, businesses, industries, farms, or just go into a drain?

It is ideal if you can all make it to where the pipe enters the creek so the students can see the water running out of the pipe. But if it is too far, you could take a picture or video in advance and share it with the students while you are all standing at the storm drain. The experience of imagining the water running underground, with more dirty water accumulating as it goes, and then seeing it pour out into the creek, can help make the learning more vivid.

Debrief the walk with students, either on-site or back in the classroom. Use some of the following questions and encourage students to ask and discuss their own questions:

• What is in the water?
• What route does water take from your house to get to the creek?
• How might this water, with the pollutants it has gathered, affect the creatures living in the creek?
• What might the consequences be for the creek’s ecosystem when the waterways are put in pipes and sent underground?
• How would the areas around these waterways look different if the waterways were aboveground or connected to the landscape, rather than under it?
  • What problems might this pose?
  • What solutions might it offer?
• What could be done to prevent stormwater from polluting the creek?
• How can the stormwater be slowed down or allowed to soak into the ground, thus removing pollutants, before it reaches the creek?
• What lifestyle changes would need to be made to prevent this pollution?

Ask students to imagine a single drop of rainwater and draw a map of where it goes as it travels to the creek. On the map, include pollutants that might accumulate along the way and creatures that live near or in the creek that will be affected by the droplet of water and its pollutants.

Finally, ask students to imagine that they had a fishpond or a vegetable garden at home and discovered that their neighbor was regularly dumping out polluted water that then ran directly into this pond or garden. How would they react? Why do we not tend to think of stormwater that passes over our property in the same way?

Design a Watershed

In Brief

Students will each design their own plot of land and then connect their plots to make up a watershed. This leads to a definition of “watershed” and a discussion about what happens when it rains and stormwater washes over their landscape and down into the waterways. What are the implications for the natural resources, community, and downstream neighbors?

Goals

Students will understand how water moves across a landscape and defines a watershed.

Students will understand that water quality is affected by land use, and that land development and stormwater management are environmental justice issues.

Students will develop ideas for how to care for streams and rivers and downstream communities.

Thinking Ahead

This activity puts students in the role of developing their own plot of land and then looking at what happens when rainfall makes their land just another piece of a watershed puzzle. It gives students increased awareness of how their choices affect others around them as well as the creek specifically. Finally, it allows students to make adjustments to their land use to protect waterways and downstream neighbors.

Watersheds work as unifying natural boundaries whether or not they are recognized by human boundaries. Within the same watershed, many governing bodies (cities, counties, townships) may coexist, each often making different rules without consulting those downstream who are directly affected by the regulations as the water washes all things downhill. In some communities, people identify themselves by their watersheds or valleys, while in other communities people do not even know that there is water running underneath their streets.

Becoming aware of watersheds and running water helps make people aware of how their land-use choices and other choices impact the quality of life for creatures and people living downstream from them, if not for those in their own community. Christians can gain from improved awareness of past broken choices regarding land use and water in order to learn to care well for the land, the water, and their downstream neighbor. As Wendell Berry puts it, “Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.”¹

Preparing the Activity

Needed:

• Copies of the watershed (30 sheets, 8.5×11 is suggested), printed from Design a Watershed. If you want to make a watershed puzzle in the shape of your local watershed, lay out a grid of office paper (tape the sheets down) and draw a shape similar to the watershed onto the grid, including outlining the major waterways and tributaries. Then number the sheets so that you can reconstruct it later. Define the lines with a thick marker. Finally, make a master copy of each sheet, so that you can reproduce the grid on future occasions as needed.

• Markers, colored pencils, or crayons (or instruct students to bring their own). Make sure to have lots of green, blue, brown, and black, as these are the most frequently used colors.

• Pictures of pollution (these are optional, but helpful) printed from free online clip art sites or magazines. You can laminate these if you wish to reuse them. Suggestions: oil, poop, cows, piles of leaves, heat waves, soap containers, toilets, salt bags, dirt piles, creepy looking monsters (bacteria), trash cans or piles of trash, piles of food waste, plastic bags, pets/pet waste, geese, etc.

• Chalk (if doing this lesson outdoors on pavement).

• A large, clear area on the classroom floor to put the puzzle together with enough space for students to congregate around it and discuss it.

Teaching the Activity

Hand out the watershed pieces randomly, so that students sitting next to each other cannot put their sheets together and start formulating the idea that they are neighbors (that should come later). Do not tell students what the activity is, or why they are doing it, or anything that will give them any preconceived notions of what is going on beyond logistics. Do not tell them what the numbers are for. If you wish, you can tell the students a framing story: “You have just stumbled upon a piece of property. It is all yours and you can use it however you want. Your imagination is your only limitation. You only need to decide what to do with it and show us this with images, words, or symbols on your property. You may consider how you will live off of your property and what you will pass on to your children.”

Provide logistical information: “If you have black lines on your land, they represent waterways, creeks, lakes, streams. If you have no black lines, you do not have any surface water on your land. You all have about 10 minutes to dream and draw your ideas. If it is helpful, think about what your property will look like from space or Google Earth when you draw it; you don’t have to make things 3-D. You may not have enough time to make careful drawings with pencils, so just go for it and capture your ideas.”

Do not give students ideas of what to draw unless they are really stuck. If so, then ask them what they are passionate about or interested in: sports? shopping? video games? food? Suggest they do something along those lines. Or ask them what their favorite place to visit is: What is their dream vacation activity? Where do they go to relax? Suggest they use this to create a piece of landscape.

Sometimes if a class is being very uniform in their ideas (e.g., 15 farms or soccer fields), it may be helpful to ask if anyone has thought about how to supply energy, or community gathering areas (e.g., library, school, town hall, church), or entertainment, or restaurants.

After 10-15 minutes, give a 1-2 minute warning and ask students to start gathering in an open area with space to put the puzzle together and enough room for everyone to stand around it. If you have a large enough piece of butcher paper, you could make a grid that is numbered to indicate where students should place their property, but this isn’t necessary if you don’t mind helping to place them in the order you created. The provided watershed sheets are to be laid out in a grid with five columns and five rows.

Ask for volunteers to explain how they developed their property. This can take as long as you want. Look at your watershed and try to choose sharers who have chosen a variety of ways to develop property. As they are sharing, drop pieces of pollution on their sites. Since the common sources of pollution in the particular watershed depicted here are mostly from stormwater that washes pollutants into streams, drop oil blobs on parking lots and roads or cars. Drop trash bags and other trash in areas of heavy traffic or parks with woods. Put dead fish in a creek that is downstream from factories or other heavy polluters. Put cows and manure on farms or in yards that might have pets. Put salt on roads, etc.

Nonchalantly keep the conversation going as you do this, avoiding giving the impression that students are being punished for sharing their creations; you are just describing reality. Do something to each site if possible so no one feels singled out. Ask questions to help students think further through the effects of their properties and to help students connect their property to the properties up or downstream from them. Tell students not to worry about the different styles of the drawings. Explain that we have now laid our properties out and created a watershed. Ask students to help you come up with a working definition of a watershed (an area of land that drains to a common body of water or common point). They could imagine that the edges of the map are raised like hills or mountains and that the waterways are the low points flowing out to the very lowest point, where the river meets the next body of water.

• How does your property affect the river? The downstream neighbor?
• How does the cow farm upstream affect your kayak business?
• How big will the parking lot need to be for your shopping mall?

Next, briefly discuss stormwater runoff. Ask students to help define stormwater runoff (excess surface water that flows across the land into the waterways from snowmelt and rain), and then think about what else might wash from their properties when it rains. Where do those things end up?

As you talk, move the pollutants from the land into the stream and down the creek. Talk about accumulation, and how the pollutants accumulate in the stream, so that as the water continues downstream, water quality gets worse and worse. We can learn a lot about how the land is being used by the quality of the water leaving the watershed. What does this water tell us about the watershed we have developed?

After visualizing the pollutants washing downstream, ask the downstream property owners how they feel about all of those things washing down to them. They will have a variety of answers, but people who actually live in these downstream communities will have the most poignant comments. Ask the downstream puzzle property owners what they would want to communicate to the upstream owners if they had the chance. They usually say something like, “Stop sending that stuff down here! Quit polluting!”

Tell students that they did not get a choice today about where their property would be; it was randomly assigned. Ask them where they would choose to live if they had a chance to choose, and why. They usually choose the headwaters or edges of the watershed, because water is clean there.

Offer a hypothetical situation where the land is distributed in a different way: people can bid on the land, and the plots can be purchased. Who would live in the headwaters of this developed watershed? The people with more money would outbid the others (this part may need to be adjusted to fit different cultural situations, but generally, wealthier people get the better living locations, while lower income people live where they can afford, often in compromised and/or dangerous areas). Who would live downstream? The people with the least money would live on the least desirable plots, probably facing pollution. People of color and lower income neighborhoods are typically located downstream, and receive a disproportionate amount of the pollution from polluted waterways. The land values of polluted areas are lower.

Next, discuss solutions. How can we make this a healthy watershed for all the residents (including plants and animals)?

Here the activity can be taken in various directions. One option is to focus on stormwater management. Slowing stormwater and allowing it to sink into the groundwater cleans it before it reaches the creek. Sediments settle out, bacteria die off, plants absorb nutrients, and even some chemicals can be broken down by the process of soaking through the ground.

You could also focus on land use. Changing some of our land uses can help restore health and beauty to the creek. Some ideas include:

• Planting trees
• Restoring the edges of streams so they are covered and surrounded by native plants and trees
• Capturing stormwater off of hard surfaces with rain gardens before the water runs into the storm drain (and into the creek)

The students may come up with other ideas like reducing trash by reusing bags, and taking the bus or biking to reduce air emissions and pollution from cars. They could fence off domestic animals to keep them from going into the creek, and compost animal waste before applying it to farm fields. Discuss with students how to give the downstream communities a voice to speak up about pollution and how to mobilize the community to value its resources and promote change.

After some brainstorming, send students back to make some changes to their properties to protect the water and show some love to their downstream neighbor. You can optionally extend this work into brainstorming exercises and research projects.

End the activity with the challenge to “Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.” Tell students that this is a quotation from Wendell Berry, and ask them if they can identify the more famous saying on which it is based. (Jesus’s formulation of the Golden Rule is found in Luke 6:31.)

Optional Outdoor Chalk Option

Sometimes you need an outdoor activity. If there is cement and chalk on hand, “Design a Watershed” can be altered and done outdoors.

Draw a big random shape (large enough for the entire group to have a good section of cement to draw on, but not so big that there would be blank areas between people), with a definite drain at one point. Using blue chalk, draw a waterway with a few tributaries inside the shape.

Introduce the activity as above. Have the students stand with their toes on the outline of the shape and tell them that they are standing on the hills or mountains surrounding a valley where they are all going to live now.

They can all use the chalk to develop their new home, but should keep in mind how they are going to provide for themselves and their children. Recommend that they draw things the way a bird would see them if flying over the valley. Let them know that the blue lines represent waterways. Remind them that they must develop their land only within the shape.

As compared to the paper version, students are more aware of each other and how their properties connect. You could suggest someone make roads to connect businesses and properties. When the development is finished, the conversation that follows is the same as with the paper watershed puzzle.

¹© 2003 by Wendell Berry, from Citizenship Papers. Used by permission of Counterpoint.

Upstream Downstream

In Brief

This is a major project activity to be conducted over a period of time. It engages your students with students in another school upstream or downstream from them in their watershed. It places love of neighbor in a practical context that is connected to learning about watersheds and ecology.

Goals

Students will have greater understanding of who their upstream and downstream neighbors actually are by building relationships or acquaintances with other students from a partnering school.

Students will develop a deeper awareness of their involvement in, and their influence on, their watershed.

Students will develop a response to share with an upstream or downstream partner student, parent, or other community member.

Thinking Ahead

Very few Americans identify themselves as watershed residents. Working to form intentional partnerships between upstream schools and downstream schools enables students to recognize their location and influence, and the interdependence within a watershed. It puts a face, name, and story to the concept of upstream and downstream neighbors.

To launch an upstream-downstream relationship, two teachers within a watershed (one upstream and one downstream) commit to working together to plan mutually beneficial learning experiences for their respective students. Teachers choose and develop these activities because they see the benefit to their students of getting to know students from another part of the watershed. Such a project not only creates a practical context for science learning, but also allows for very concrete exploration of the possible connections between ecology, science learning, and an ethic of love of neighbor. Teaching FASTly involves exploring these kinds of connections rather than teaching each part of the picture as if it existed in isolation, with faith, science, and community separated. In your regular science teaching practices, consider how often you work to help students see these wider connections.

Preparing the Activity

Needed:

• The specific materials needed vary with the type of project chosen.

• Presentation slides from Upstream Downstream Slideshow

• Copies of Stream Physical Survey Handout

Teaching the Activity

Contact your local Drain Commissioner, Department of Natural Resources representative, or another local government official to find out what watershed your school is in, if you don’t already know. Using a map of your watershed, locate other schools in the watershed, and ask around to find another school or teacher who would be interested in connecting over watershed issues.

Begin conversations with your partner teacher about what your students and school locations have and do not have in common within the watershed. What experiences do students share, and how are their lives different? How are the schools similar, and how are they different?

Watersheds are integrators; they unify, because everyone has water in common. However, people’s experiences of that water can vary greatly within a watershed depending on where they live (see the activity Design a Watershed). Collect as much information about the watershed as you can, or invite a professional who knows about the watershed to instruct the students from both schools about their two areas in the watershed and the overall issues the watershed faces.

Discuss common interests in studying the watershed, and identify subjects that might lend themselves to common study projects. For example, perhaps both teachers are interested in research techniques and want to research water quality in order to compare results. Or perhaps both schools are open to connecting science and history, offering the possibility of research and oral history projects in the two areas. Environmental justice issues could be the joint focus of geography, social studies, and Bible or religion classes. Studies in plants, animals, local water laws, land-use planning, or other subjects could be drawn together in a common focus on the watershed. Partnering on the installation of a rain garden or another green infrastructure project at each school could create a rich learning experience. The details of the project will vary with the context, but the objective is to create meaningful connections between those upstream and those downstream, focused around ecological learning.

Introduce students to the idea of making a connection with a school upstream or downstream from them. Frame the project using the following quotation from “Watershed and Commonwealth,” an essay by Wendell Berry (included for presentation in Upstream Downstream):

People who live at the lower ends of watersheds cannot be isolationist—or not for long. Pretty soon they will notice that water flows, and that will set them to thinking about the people upstream who either do or do not send down their silt and pollutants and garbage. Thinking about the people upstream ought to cause further thinking about the people downstream. Such pondering on the facts of gravity and the fluidity of water shows us that the golden rule speaks to a condition of absolute interdependency and obligation. People who live on rivers might rephrase the rule in this way: Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.¹

Discuss with students:

• What does Berry mean by being “isolationist”?
• Why does he think it is harder for people downstream to be isolationist?
• Why might people upstream be tempted to be isolationist?
• What is the original version of the “Golden Rule”? Where does it come from? (“Do to others what you would have them do to you.” Jesus in Matthew 7:12)
• What does the Golden Rule have to do with gravity and fluidity? How does it apply to watersheds?
• Can we obey the Golden Rule (the original or the rephrased version) without learning about who lives upstream/downstream from us?

If possible, pair students with partners from the other school and arrange a way to get to know each other. Means of doing this might range from an online discussion board to a watershed tour with both schools traveling and doing activities together at sites along the tour. If a tour can be arranged, students will get to see the landscape of the watershed and get to know students from the other school at the same time. Share ideas for projects during site visits.

In collaboration with your partner teacher, choose an activity for both classes to take part in, using the shared creek or watershed as the lab. This could involve a comparative study of some aspect of the watershed, including:

• Water quality testing
• Studying macro-invertebrates and fish in the water
• Studying vegetation along the banks
• Water temperature measurement
• Visual comparisons of the creek in both places

You could create collaboration with other subject areas by including drawing or art projects, writing or poetry, historical investigation, or video. As students gather data, invite them to focus on the land use around the two schools as well. Have them consider the ways in which those downstream might be affected by those upstream.

As this activity is carried out, look for issues that might allow for a response project. This could be conducted with the partner school or independently. Students could, for instance, research and begin to implement ways to slow stormwater with rain gardens and rain barrels, or by planting trees and native plants. They may decide to raise awareness with videos, posters, events, or other methods of sharing their findings with their communities. They may create an artistic response. The results of these activities can be shared not only with your immediate community, but also with the partner school, either in person or as part of a joint web page or publication.

At the conclusion of the project, return to the quotation from Wendell Berry and discuss it again with your class:

• What was most rewarding or most challenging about the project?
• What parts of our project could be seen as a response to the Golden Rule (the original or the rephrased version)?
• What have you learned about ways in which we may still be falling short of loving our neighbor?

Optional Extras

Activities that you could do involving both schools to extend learning about local water ecology and create data to share and compare include:

1. Identify a local stream that has a site that is safe to visit with students and obtain a water testing kit such as the LaMotte Earth Force: Low-Cost Monitoring Kit or the larger LaMotte Earth Force Standard Monitoring Kit. (If this is to be a regular event, the larger kit is a better value and can be used for a longer period.)

   Use the kit with students to gather data on water quality at both school sites and compare upstream and downstream data. Divide students into small groups (3-4 students) and provide them with gloves, directions, supplies, and data record sheets (or have them bring their field notebooks ready to record information). It may be helpful to have groups establish roles: instruction reader, recorder, and investigators. At the stream site, have groups proceed through the instructions that come with the testing kit and record data. You could ask groups to start a spreadsheet of data points to compare over time. This would allow them to construct some simple graphs.

   When students have collected data, work with students to interpret their numbers into a statement of the health condition of the stream. For instance, if the pH is 6, how does that relate to a healthy pH? What does this tell us about the stream? What factors influence that water quality variable in a watershed (i.e., what factors influence the pH of the stream?)? Have students create a “report card” for the stream based on the test results.

2. Measuring a creek’s size and surroundings can be a useful way to observe and understand influences on the creek. When a creek has streambank erosion, there will be excess sediment in the water, changing the habitat and species-dominance of the aquatic creatures. This erosion is often caused by stormwater that rushes in during and following a rain or melt event. These erosive sediments further dig out the banks and the streambeds, further disconnecting the stream from its floodplain, which would normally absorb energy, sediments, and nutrients from the stormwater.

   In urban areas, or almost any landscape affected by humans, stormwater flow is speeded to the creeks in an effort to avoid flooding. As a result, the creeks swell quickly, and this dramatically increased flow causes erosion in the streambed itself, which leads to streambank damage. Stream Physical Survey includes a detailed survey form and teacher instructions that can be used to engage students in a physical survey of stream erosion and condition.

¹© 2003 by Wendell Berry, from Citizenship Papers. Used by permission of Counterpoint.

A Stewardship Story

In Brief

This activity engages students in learning about one community’s efforts to bring science, education, faith, and action together to improve conditions in a watershed. It encourages students to see how a complex of factors can come together to bring about change, and how faith, hope, and love can inform work for long-term change.

Goals

Students will learn about the story of a long-term effort to reduce pollution in a watershed and understand the strategies involved.

Students will reflect on the relationships between multiple factors, including faith, science, and community action, in bringing about ecological improvement.

Thinking Ahead

Learning about ecological problems can be disheartening. Given the complexity of the factors involved, and the ways in which they often seem inextricably interwoven with the habits and lifestyles of large populations, it can feel as if there is little that an individual can do, and this can lead to cynicism or apathy. Teaching about ecology in connection with faith raises the challenge of conveying the roles of hope, community, and commitment amid a realistic assessment of the problems facing us.

This activity seeks to show students a glimpse of how the complex interconnections that give rise to problems are also part of how we can work to address them. It encourages reflection on how science, faith, schools, churches, history, and action can all be interconnected in work towards change. Teaching FASTly explores these kinds of connections rather than teaching each part of the picture as if it existed in isolation, with faith, science, and community separated. In your regular science teaching practices, consider how often you work to help students see these wider connections.

Related Book Review: Song of a Scientist: The Harmony of a God-Soaked Creation by Calvin B. DeWitt

Preparing the Activity

Needed:

• Copies of A Stewardship Story

• Presentation slide from A Stewardship Story

Teaching the Activity

Begin with a short discussion with students of the differences between optimism and hope. Ask students to discuss briefly in pairs whether there are differences between someone who is optimistic about how things will go and someone who has hope. Elicit that while the two terms are often used in similar ways, optimism focuses more on the expectation that things will go well, whereas hope may involve a determination to keep seeking and traveling towards a desired goal even if things do not go so well along the way. Hope trusts in a promised future, and combined with faith, it can allow us to continue to trust through apparent failure. As the New Testament book of Hebrews (11:1, NET) puts it, “faith is being sure of what we hope for, being convinced of what we do not see.”

As a transition to the reading activity, ask students to reflect on how optimistic they are about future improvement in the ecological problems surrounding watersheds. Mention that lack of hope can lead to cynicism and inaction.

Hand out copies of A Stewardship Story, and have students form pairs or groups of three. Ask them first to read through the story of Plaster Creek. When there has been enough time to read it through, spend a few minutes with the class checking their understanding of key terms: rain gardens, bioswales, nonpoint source pollution, green infrastructure, native plants. Then display the following clusters of terms on the board or the screen (see A Stewardship Story):

watersheds – stormwater – native plants

paved surfaces – rain gardens – pollutants

schools – research – watersheds

churches – watersheds – science

science – theology – watersheds

science education – oral history – watersheds

trust – hope – ecological improvement

government – schools – individuals and families

Assign two or more of these clusters to each pair or group (multiple groups can investigate the same clusters, and you can divide them up in various ways depending on the size of your group and how long you would like to devote to this part of the activity). Ask each pair or group to search through the story for any information that shows a connection between the three terms in each cluster, and to be prepared to explain to the rest of the class how each term interacts with the other two in the work of the Plaster Creek Stewards. Emphasize that they need not just point to places where the terms are connected, but should explain why each term is important in relation to the others.

When they have had enough time to investigate and prepare, call on different pairs or groups to explain the relationships between the terms in each cluster. Allow other students to add to the picture. The goal here is to help students appreciate the complex web of relationships that goes into working for ecological improvement.

Finally, return to the theme of optimism or hope. Discuss the following questions with students:

• Do you see arguments for or against optimism in the Plaster Creek story?
• Do you see any reason for hope in the Plaster Creek story?
• Why do you think the Plaster Creek Stewards continue with this work despite not seeing immediate results?
• Why is it harder to work for complex, long-term goals than for quick fixes? How might faith, hope, and love help here?
• Why would Christian educators invest so much energy in helping to improve a watershed?

If desired, you could ask students to write up an account of the relationships within one or more of the clusters of terms in the context of the Plaster Creek Stewards story.