Building Environmental Education from Community Resources
Sophie Diliberti, Justin Hougham, Brad Bessler, and Brooke Bellmar
ocusing on specific aspects of learners’ local context can increase their engagement in environmental education. One way for educators to pinpoint a community’s specific environmental circumstances is by adapting existing locally focused sustainability resources. After establishing the environmental issues that are relevant to the community, educators can maximize the geographic benefit of a local focus by incorporating geographic awareness and in-person exploration into their curriculum. This paper examines a case study in Milwaukee, Wisconsin: a lesson plan which adapts existing environmental education resources to pinpoint the local issue of stormwater management. The lesson also uses a StoryMap and walking tour to foster geographic awareness.
Community-specific issues: Strategies for educators to produce a more local focus.
Too often, environmental education focuses on issues that are removed from students’ lived experiences. Although melting icebergs and starving polar bears are compelling images, students must recognize that many types of environmental problems–and solutions–occur right in their backyards. Localized environmental education has been shown to be effective at increasing educational outcomes and sustainable behavior within communities (Ardoin, 2020, Fisman, 2010). Using specific community context ensures that the content of the lesson will be relevant to the lives of the students. While a field trip to a zoo or state park can certainly be interesting, knowledge about the environmental issues in places where students actually live provides a different kind of educational value.
Many communities have existing environmental outreach materials regarding specific local issues. Whether they come from university extension divisions, grassroots political organizations, or other local sources, these materials reveal issues that are important for community members to understand. Even if they are too young to understand those exact resources, students deserve this community knowledge, so the resources are worth adapting for them to consume.
Making the most of a place-specific focus by incorporating maps and in-person exploration.
Assuming a lesson plan centers around the specific context of the school and community, the next step is to maximize those benefits by explicitly focusing on geographic awareness and spatial reasoning in the lesson plan.
Using maps can increase spatial awareness and embodied learning for students, making maps a good starting point to accomplish this goal (Taylor, 2019). StoryMaps, a web-based Esri software which allows the user to incorporate maps, legends, text, photos, and videos into a spatial narrative, can provide a great resource for educators looking to incorporate maps into their curriculums. The interactive nature of a StoryMap allows students to engage with the geography of where they live and has been proven to increase geographic awareness (Purwanto et al., 2022).
Another way to harness the benefits of place-specific education is to provide opportunities for students to get outside and explore. In-person tours can be more productive if students have already learned the background of what they are exploring through a StoryMap or similar resource. Their questions will likely be less superficial after learning the basic context in the classroom.
Case study background: Milwaukee and green infrastructure.
Milwaukee is a city lucky to be situated at the confluence of three rivers and Lake Michigan. The city relies heavily on these bodies of water for drinking water, industry, transportation, and recreation, and they must be stewarded carefully to ensure long-term health. The city’s combined sewer system, which cleans wastewater and stormwater at the same time, is the foundation of many of its stormwater management challenges. The combined sewer system is useful most of the time: it filters pollutants out of runoff before releasing the stormwater into the lake. However, during some major storm events, the treatment plant receives too much water and experiences an overflow. During an overflow, the plant is forced to release unfiltered wastewater and stormwater into the lake. To avoid sewer overflows during storms, the city must minimize the amount of water that reaches the sewer system in the first place.
Milwaukee’s water-rich environment comes with essential benefits and difficult challenges.
A Milwaukee sewer overflow in 2010.
Green infrastructure (GI) is any modification to a built environment that mimics natural systems to provide some type of ecosystem service. GI is often applied to stormwater management, where it harnesses natural systems to filter and slow down water right where it falls instead of funneling it directly into sewer systems. Native plants with deep roots, rain gardens, bioswales, and rain barrels are all examples of GI used for stormwater management. The Village of Shorewood, a Milwaukee suburb that lies between the Milwaukee River and Lake Michigan, has implemented many beneficial GI projects as a response to its uniquely water-rich location and subsequent stormwater management issues.
Creating a map and walking tour for the Village of Shorewood.
In August of 2023, UW-Madison Extension worked with the Village to create a StoryMap that listed all the GI in the village (called “Shorewood’s Water Walk”). “Shorewood’s Water Walk” was useful in many ways but lacked a clear audience or use-case. This map is still linked on the village website, but has no designated users or associated events. You can find this this map here: https://arcg.is/15rmf90
In the summer of 2024, I redesigned “Shorewood’s Water Walk” so it could be used by local elementary schools. The new lesson plan, titled “Where Does My Water Go? Exploring the Shorewood Watershed,” includes a more targeted StoryMap and two walking tours, one that starts from each elementary school in the district. Instead of living on the village website, the new StoryMap and walking tours would go into the curriculum of local teachers to educate students about a very specific sustainability issue in their community. You can find this 2024 map here: https://arcg.is/10HvTX
The lesson’s StoryMap begins with a section called Shorewood’s Water History. This section uses pictures and diagrams to explain some key ways Indigenous water and land management differed from the city’s current stormwater management and combined sewer system. This section includes the interactive slider displayed below, which can be moved side-to-side to allow students to visualize temporal differences in state geography and Indigenous land.
An interactive sliding map to visualize Indigenous land before European colonizers arrived compared to in the present day.
Shorewood’s Water History also introduces the significance of the city’s combined sewer system and explains the concept of a watershed, which may be new to students using the map,
The map at the end of the StoryMap gives the students the opportunity to practice identifying GI before they leave the classroom to explore examples in the real world.
In the next section–Types of Green Infrastructure–the map provides picture-heavy identification and categorization tools for GI, using, when possible, pictures directly from examples in the village. This system of categorization is designed to give students the tools to identify and understand GI in the village. It uses categories designed by the Center for Neighborhood Technology. The image below captures an example of one of the types of GI included in the StoryMap.
Permeable pavement is one of nine types of GI that students will learn to identify from the StoryMap.
The StoryMap ends with a section called Identifying GI in Shorewood: an interactive map which shows different types of GI throughout the village. This adds geographic literacy in an interactive form, as students can zoom and click around the map. It also incorporates an application of the lesson’s content by asking students to identify what type of GI is located at each spot based on a picture and short description.
This one-mile walking tour demonstrates different types of GI located close to the elementary school.
The second part of the lesson plan is a walking tour designed to be led by the teacher after the students have spent time interacting with the StoryMap. The walking tour helps contextualize the StoryMap’s information in the real world, cementing it more firmly in the students’ understanding. The StoryMap, completed before the walking tour, should give the students enough context to ask more insightful questions, allowing the tour to focus on curious investigation rather than basic concepts.
Conclusion
Every community has climate and sustainability-related problems, needs, and solutions. From tree cover to invasive species to food sovereignty to public transportation, community awareness of these issues has the potential to create and manage environmental solutions. Toomey (2016) frames conservation as “…a social process that engages science, not a scientific process that engages society,” (p. 623) highlighting the importance of community outreach and education.
“Where Does My Water Go?” was initially a response to this need–an attempt to clarify and improve the engagement of the old StoryMap, “Shorewood’s Water Walk,” by narrowing its intended audience to elementary-aged students. During this process, it became apparent that adapting existing community resources can also be useful for environmental educators. It ensures relevance and contextual engagement for students, as well as provoking community engagement around important issues.
This lesson plan demonstrates two useful practices for creating environmental education lesson plans. First, it creates specificity and place-based relevance in district education by focusing on an environmental issue that is uniquely important to the area. Second, it maximizes that local focus by incorporating a map-based narrative (the StoryMap) and in-person exploration (the walking tour). These practices aim to spark student inquiry and curiosity.
In order to encourage even more active participation in the lesson, the ideal extension of this project would ask students to help create the StoryMap themselves. The co-generation of knowledge that this process could provide would keep students engaged and provide a unique opportunity to synthesize their lived experiences with information they learn from other sources.
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Images
[Digital Map] Milwaukee Estuary AOC Boundary. Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, City of Milwaukee, WI, Milwaukee County Land Info, Esri, HERE, Garmin, SafeGraph, METI/NASA, USGS, EPA, NPS, USDA. https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/topic/GreatLakes/Milwaukee.html
Was, M. (2010). [Photograph]. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. https://archive.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/getting-milwaukees-rivers-to-meet-state-water-quality-standards-wont-be-easy-b9948758z1-262245161.html
[Digital Map]. Milwaukee Public Museum. https://www.mpm.edu/educators/wirp/nations
[Digital Map]. Wisconsin Tribal Nations. Travel Wisconsin. https://www.travelwisconsin.com/article/native-culture/native-american-tribes-in-wisconsin
[Digital Image]. Earth.com. https://www.earth.com/earthpedia-articles/what-is-a-watershed-am-i-in-one/
Prostak, C. Charted Territory [basemap]. Esri. July 9, 2024. (July 2, 2024).
Author bio
Sophie Diliberti is an undergraduate at Macalester College. She is working in watershed education and outreach with the UW-Madison Division of Extension.