Using the Mississippi River Watershed Module in Science of Sustainability

Melissa Hey, Bentley University

Course Description

In this course, we investigate the science underlying a range of environmental sustainability topics. Specifically, this course explores issues pertaining to several planetary boundaries including global climate change, ocean acidification, nutrient loading, land-system change, and freshwater resource depletion. These topics in environmental sciences are paired with integration of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to address issues of environmental justice. Within these frameworks, students explore challenges of supporting a growing population and increasing economic development along with creative solutions that minimize the burden placed on the natural environment and future generations.

Three sections of this course were offered by the instructor in the spring of 2024.

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Relationship of the Mississippi River Watershed Module to Your Course

Science of Sustainability was taught as an in-person course during the spring term of 2024 when the common exercise was implemented. The common exercise was initiated in the 8th week of a ~14 week term at which point the class had covered global climate change, land-system change, and trends in population growth and development over time. Prior to the start of the BASICS common exercise students had engaged with concepts of wicked problems and environmental justice when learning about global climate change and pathways to decarbonization.

The common exercise was used to introduce students to role of stakeholders and power dynamics in addressing complex issues and was their first foray into concept mapping and collective decision-making, which is revisited immediately following the end of the common exercise as we explore wicked problems of water depletion using the American West as a case study. The common exercise was a helpful tool to introduce students to the challenge posed by inter-stakeholder conflicts arising from wicked problems of sustainability. The students built an understanding of how some stakeholders can exert dominant influence over collective decision-making and result in environmental injustices towards other groups. Students understood the concept mapping as a tool to better explore and visually represent the complex interactions in the system, but the roleplay and town hall was critical in creating student investment in the common exercise. Students passionately advocated for their own and other stakeholder positions during the town hall and afterwards reflected on the value of experiential learning for their appreciation of wicked problems of sustainability.

This module was followed by a water allocation and scarcity module focused on the American West (specifically, the Colorado River Basin). Students reflected on the similarities and differences between the common exercise (in which we explored water contamination through nutrient pollution) and the water module addressing water allocation and scarcity.

Learning outcomes from the common exercise that were carried through the remainder of the course included (1) identifying and describing the ways in which anthropogenic systems and natural systems intersect and affect one another (2) discerning when and how environmental injustices arise and (3) appreciating how wicked problems of sustainability lack clear-cut solutions that benefit all stakeholders. These were included in the water scarcity module described above as well as the term project for the class, which is a project proposal through which students research and describe a community sustainability issue through the frameworks adopted in class.

Integrating the Module into Your Course

In Science of Sustainability, the common exercise was integrated a little over halfway through the course. During about a 13 to 14 week series, we had gotten through introducing the Anthropocene, introducing dependencies of people on the environment, understanding that there are bidirectional relationships with how humans interact with natural systems, and we had done a deep dive into climate change. We moved into the common exercise in the context of nutrient cycling and biogeochemical flows with regard to the planetary boundaries framework. Students, prior to starting the common exercise, got two full lectures on nutrient cycling, specifically for nitrogen and phosphorus, understanding why these are limiting nutrients, how they play into ecosystem health, and how humans depend on, and also modify, the abundance and availability of these nutrients in terrestrial systems specifically.

In the common exercise, we really understood how nutrients can be pesky once they're made available in places where they're naturally scarce, because they're carried with water. That's where we brought in the common exercise, introduced the movement of limiting nutrients into waterways, creating issues of vitrification and dead zones, and then launched our three-class exercise with students being assigned their stakeholder groups, getting into the student guide for the Wicked Problem of Nutrient Loading in the Mississippi River Watershed, having the work period, and then doing our presentations and wrap-up discussion. The common exercise was followed by a water scarcity and allocation module, where students had to apply the skills that they learned from the common exercise to a different issue of water allocation in the American West.

What Worked Well

Overall, the role play works really well with students, especially because I'm at a business institution. Students tend to be a little bit more shy of doing deep dives into scientific topics, but doing this as a role-play exercise where they had personal investment in the stakes and the outcomes, knowing that there would be this town hall where we would be respectfully discussing, and in a way, debating with each other the different solutions that teams were advocating for. There was a greater level of passion from the students for this assignment compared to a previous group project on decarbonization that we had done that wasn't tied to any kind of stakeholder perspectives. That worked really well to draw them out of their shells, both in terms of interacting with their teams, but also in getting invested with the actual content, wanting to see the outcomes that they're advocating for, and caring about trying to convince others of the validity of the positions.

Challenges and How They Were Addressed

The biggest challenge for this exercise, this activity, is the ambiguity of the concept mapping and stakeholder mapping. Overall, the students did really well understanding the different human perspectives. Before the town hall, trying to get them to appreciate that there are other perspectives that we haven't necessarily laid out in the student guide was a little bit challenging. The students didn't really get there until after we'd gone through the town hall, and they'd been workshopping their own stakeholder perspectives. At a glance, what perspectives aren't represented here, and how does that connect to environmental injustice? Our understanding of that became much clearer post-town hall, but pre-town hall, they had a hard time envisioning anything other than the stakeholders that they saw in the student guide. The creative part of actually doing the concept mapping, for the most part, eluded them. They did a good job with discussing the thought questions after the town hall, so much so that we actually ran out of time to do the second version of the stakeholder map as a class, which I felt okay about, because they chewed on the topics through discussion with each other a lot more. Adding a whole other class for the class stakeholder map would be necessary to give them enough time to wrap their heads around using other parts of their brains for creative and visual representation of our understanding.

Student Response to the Module and Activities

Students did really well with the module. Some teams definitely went for it more than others. I think there were some moments with the student guide and the resources that students were given ahead of time, where students would see that one team had three resources listed under their stakeholder and other teams only had one, that they were not quite sure how to grapple with that until we were actually in the guided workflow on the second day, which was really helpful for them. Overall, they really understood the importance of appreciating the connectivity between anthropogenic and natural systems. That came out really well.

I have dialogued with my students all semester about what appropriate use of generative AI looks like, what inappropriate use of generative AI looks like, and specifically prompted them with "how does this type of exercise impact your learning compared to generative AI?" I gave them a response from ChatGPT to one of the thought questions that we had in our debrief session after the town hall. Overwhelmingly, the students said that if they had just read the ChatGPT responses, they might have been tempted to just copy and paste that into a reflection. But engaging in the role play helped them practice forming an opinion, appreciating different perspectives, and experiencing them firsthand had a really profound impact on the takeaways that they had with regard to the significance of challenges of sustainability.