1. Describe factors that lead to increased flooding (e.g., floodplain loss, urbanization, deforestation, and climate change) and natural disasters.

2. Describe, explain, and illustrate the natural and artificial causes of river flooding and the connection of flooding to atmospheric phenomena.

3. Identify the disproportionate effects of flooding and flood mitigation on marginalized communities.

4. Describe the meaning of climate justice from an individual and personal perspective.

5. Conduct interviews and educational outreach with community members affected by flooding.

6. Create a flyer, handout, poster, brochure, social media post, video, zine, or WordPress site that presents information to a public audience.

7. Reflect on the effectiveness of educational outreach efforts implemented by interviewing community members and sharing information.

This activity is a quarter-long project that I am using at my two-year college in an introductory physical geology course and a natural hazards and disasters course, when students learn about river processes and flooding. The class size for these courses is 24 students, and they are taught over a 10-week-long quarter (term). (There are laboratory sessions each week in which the class is split into two groups of 12, for their own session, but this activity does not occur during lab.) I begin this activity during the third week of the quarter and students have the remainder of the quarter to complete it. Before students encounter this activity, they should know about river dynamics, floodplains and flooding, flood mitigation, and the benefits and harms of dams. They also should know how flood probability is calculated, how humans affect floodplains, and how climate change causes flooding to be more frequent and intense due to more intense rainfall (i.e, atmospheric rivers in our region). Students should also know how to gather information about an issue from credible sources such as a library or other research databases. Thus, before the activity begins, students have already learned about flooding in general; this project focuses their learning on flooding in our region. This activity could be adapted for a high-school earth sciences course, as well as for four-year colleges and universities, especially if class discussions can occur with instructors or graduate teaching assistants who are educated about local flooding issues and flood mitigation options. This activity focuses on local communities in and around Centralia, Washington, USA, but could be adapted to the local contexts of other flood-prone regions where communities are dealing with major flooding issues. The case study itself is valuable, even if taught to students living in another region of the world, because the Chehalis River is the only river in Washington state (USA) that is not dammed. This case study can be a powerful one in any context where an instructor, living in any region of the world, wants to provide an example of a free-flowing river and what can happen with flooding and flood mitigation when rivers are not dammed.

Instructor Class Preparation: Check links to all online videos and resources; prepare PowerPoint presentation for Step 2 and student worksheet for the class discussions that happen in Steps 1 and 2; print out student worksheets for Steps 1 and 2; upload the Climate Justice Project.docx" Word file and grading rubric to your Learning Management System (LMS) and set up a submission link for student work for Steps 3 through 6 (or print out the project document, rubric, and assignments for distribution to students during class time if you do not use an LMS)

Step 1: Case Study on Flooding and Flood Mitigation in Centralia, Washington, USA (50 minutes). My college lies in the Chehalis River floodplain, as does the entire city of Centralia where my college is located; thus, we experience a lot of flooding. I begin this activity by introducing students to the history of flooding in the area through showing a 28-minute-long documentary, High Water: Ten Years Later. This video was produced in 2017, 10 years after a major flooding event flooded the entire city and precipitated regional action to address the issue. This video describes the 2007 flood event, which was like no flood the people living in the region had ever seen. It also describes the atmospheric rivers that hit our region, which is one of the major reasons we experience so much flooding. The video describes how and why the long-term strategy for addressing flooding that we have today (Chehalis Basin Long-Term Strategy) came into existence, and the potential impacts of this strategy on local communities. This video offers limited solutions that involve building a large-scale dam upstream (the Chehalis River is the only river that is not dammed in Washington state), building levees around the entire stretch of the I-5 corridor that gets flooded during these events, or asking farmers to relocate (displacing them from their land by buying their homes) to re-connect the floodplain to the river. These are not the only or best choices available, and I present more options to students during a presentation in Step 2.

After showing this documentary, I lead a class discussion in which students answer questions related to what they learned from it. Individual students write their answers to each question on the "Documentary Class Discussion.docx" handout and I collect it from them at the end of class for a grade. The questions ask about the events that led up to the 2007 flood, the three mitigation options presented in the video, and the downsides of each option. These questions, specifically, help students begin to build the knowledge they will need to create their information-sharing resource in Step 4 and conduct the interviews with three community members in Step 5. I also ask students to share their own story with the class (i.e., Where were they during the last flood? Did their house flood?). Most of the students who take my class live locally and have had direct experience with flooding in their lifetimes, so this part of the discussion builds community in my classroom around this issue. I also live locally, and our college is affected by flooding. While most were not alive yet in 2007, or old enough to remember the massive flood that occurred that year, many remember other major "100-year-flood" events in 2015, 2019, and 2022 and/or their parents remember the 2007 flood and may have talked to them about it. At the end of the class session, students turn the document in for a grade.

Chehalis_Documentary Class Discussion.docx (Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx) 16kB Jun17 24)

Step 2: Climate Justice Project Introduction (50 minutes). During this class session, I assign students the climate justice project that they will complete throughout the rest of the quarter. I give them the grading rubric I will use to evaluate their project at the end of the quarter (see Excel file below). I spend a lot of time educating students about the history of flooding in our region, what local stakeholders have been doing about it, and what the options are moving forward, to prepare students for Steps 4 and 5, when they will create a resource for sharing this information and interview local community members. The stakeholders who first proposed a large-scale dam project to address flooding formed the Chehalis River Basin Flood Control Zone District. They knew there would be significant adverse impacts on surrounding communities and environments, so they requested a national Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). (The National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) of the United States requires federal agencies to prepare an EIS for major federal actions, such as a large dam, that significantly affect the quality of the human environment. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reviews the EIS and comments on whether the proposed action is acceptable from the standpoint of public health, welfare, and environmental quality.) The findings of NEPA on the impacts of the dam detail 43 total effects with only four effects being positive. The positives include reducing downstream flood damage risk, an increase in income/employment, an increase in government revenue, and an increase to emergency service response (see Slides 17 and 18 of the PowerPoint presentation for an overview of all categories of effects that were assessed). In 2020, the governor of Washington State (Jay Inslee) stepped in and said that due to the many adverse impacts, an exploration of alternatives to a dam needed to be explored. He created the Chehalis Basin Board, which is composed of two members appointed by the governor, one member each appointed by the Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation and the Quinault Indian Nation, and three members appointed by the Chehalis River Basin Flood Authority (which is governed by elected representatives of 13 local city and county governments, including three members who are commissioners of the Chelhalis River Basin Flood Control Zone District (FCZD) which sponsored the dam). The Chehalis River Basin Flood Authority is the member pushing for the dam and an increase in tax levies to fund the dam. The work by the Chehalis Basin Board resulted in the Chehalis Basin Long-Term Strategy, which presents three options for mitigating flooding: "large-scale reduction" (a large dam with the many adverse impacts as described in the EIS); "local action alternatives" or "non-dam alternatives," including aquatic species restoration; or to continue to "do nothing".

After I present these options to students, I highlight the many positive things already taking place as part of the "local action alternatives" option and as part of aquatic species restoration (Collaboration is Key: How people are working together to restore river habitat in the Chehalis Basin). As part of this sharing of positive stories of change, I present the projects occurring on China Creek, a small tributary of the larger Chehalis River; mostly lined with concrete, it flows under the city of Centralia. Flooding of this tributary happens regularly and causes major damage to downtown businesses, including our campus. The city of Centralia has sponsored many "local action alternatives" (e.g., habitat restoration techniques) including the section that runs through campus (and I share that we have a new resident beaver and baby Coho Salmon on our campus because of it!). On our campus we were able to remove the concrete and create a small local area that could flood. Other positive initiatives include the larger city-sponsored China Creek Water Storage Project, which occurred further upstream on China Creek and has been shown to significantly reduce flooding in downtown Centralia based on data from the last big flood. (I point out to students how China Creek did not top the banks during this flood and these mitigation efforts were the reason!) During this project, I take students to see examples of re-vegetation, floodplain re-connection, and other flood mitigation efforts at the upstream sites. I also make sure that students understand how flood insurance works, so that students know that the amount of money received by people whose homes are flooded is nowhere near what they would need to relocate and replace their home by purchasing another home. (The book The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration (2023) by Jake Bittle might be a helpful resource for an instructor and/or students wishing to learn more about the impact of flooding on peoples' lives, as it presents four very readable chapters which each present a case study in the states (USA) of North Carolina, Louisiana, Texas, and Virginia.)  I also share with students how there is a potential secondary geological hazard as the proposed dam location is near a shallow crustal fault. I also talk about the consequences of no action (Option 3 on Slide 30 of my PowerPoint presentation), which requires dealing with flooding and its aftermath every time it happens. These patterns will only get worse with climate change. I describe how increased urbanization is affecting flooding and how flooding affects the local economy. I end by telling students the current status of this issue, which is that we are still waiting for the final results from EPA and the NEPA results. After this presentation, I lead a class discussion in which students answer questions related to the social, cultural, economic, and environmental positives and negatives of each of the three mitigation options presented.  As with the class-discussion questions that follow the documentary (Step 1), these questions are intended to prepare students for the information-sharing resource they will create in Step 4 and the interviews they will conduct in Step 5.

Chehalis_Climate Justice Project Class Discussion.docx (Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx) 15kB Jun17 24)

Chehalis_Introduction to Climate Justice.pptx (PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) 27.6MB Jun17 24)

Chehalis_Climate Justice Project.docx (Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx) 16kB Jun17 24)

Chehalis_Climate Justice Project Grading Rubric.xlsx (Excel 2007 (.xlsx) 11kB Jun17 24)

Step 3: Climate Justice Research (30 minutes). This assignment is work that students do outside class time to prepare them for Steps 4 and 5, where they will need to describe what climate justice means to them in the informational resources that they create. For this assignment, I ask students to look up three different sources of information that describe climate justice and then provide a summary or definition of climate justice in their own words, as well as what climate justice means to them. I offer students one resource to get them started, which is a What is Climate Justice? Library Guide (LibGuide) created by librarians at my college in collaboration with me. Most students use this resource as their starting point, as they know the information on the LibGuide is credible. However, students learn about and gain practice in gathering information and evaluating the credibility of an information source in the weeks that lead up to this project (See Teaching Notes and Tips for more details). As a result, I know they know how to find credible sources of information. A similar LibGuide created by your school's library is not a resource that is necessary for implementing this activity in your class, but it is a nice resource that my college's librarians were willing to create, and librarians at many colleges can create similar resources. Some students also created a QR code for their informational resources (Step 4) so that the people whom they interviewed could access it. (QR is Quick Response and the camera function on a smartphone can be used to quickly access resources tied to a QR code.) The LibGuide defines climate justice for students to start with, and provides many other resources about climate change science, how climate change connects to social issues, ecological justice, and environmental justice. It also provides a "Self-Evaluation," where students can take the very short (four multiple choice questions) Six Americas Super Short Survey (SASSY) created by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. There is a discussion board space to process the content they are learning and share their insight with their peers. Finally, the LibGuide provides a list of local, national, and international organizations that advocate for climate justice.

Step 4: Create a Resource for Information Sharing (1 to 5 hours, depending on the resource created and how familiar students are with the materials and technologies needed to create the resource). Students work on the assignment for this step, as well as the assignments for Step 5 and Step 6, on their own outside class, and it is not due until the end of the quarter. The goal of this step is for students to create an informational resource that they will then present to the community members whom they interview (Step 5). I give students several options in terms of the type of informational resource they create, including a flyer, handout, poster, brochure, social media post, video, zine, or Wordpress site. (On our campus, we are able to print out large-scale posters for our students and zine supplies in our library's MakerSpace, if they choose these options.) I give students guidelines for the type of information that needs to be included in their informational resources, including what climate justice means to them, the three mitigation options proposed in the Chehalis Basin Long-Term Strategy to reduce flooding in the Chehalis River basin, and the social, cultural, economic, and environmental positives and negatives of each option. I provide them with all the materials that I presented during Step 3 (e.g., the EIS, and letter from Governor Inslee).

Step 5: Community Interviews (1 to 1.5 hours). Students interview at least three different community members and collect feedback and opinions about the flooding issue and options for addressing it from each community member. I provide students with questions to ask and allow them to conduct interviews in written or recorded form (e.g., audio recordings of videos). In some cases, especially for students who are living on campus and do not know many members of the wider off-campus community, I assist students with finding community members to interview, as I have connections with several members of the community beyond our campus. The purpose of the interviews is to allow students the chance to engage with their community and learn others' thoughts and opinions on the flooding issue. Because many people in the local community think the dam is the sensible choice and are not aware of the other options, or they are unaware how the large-scale dam would affect tribal communities, farmers, and the small town of Pe Ell, these interviews also allow for an outreach and education effort.

Step 6: Project Survey and Reflection (25 minutes). To wrap up the project, students complete an online survey that I set up using Microsoft Office forms (link to survey and pdf of survey below). The survey not only provides students with a chance to reflect on their experience with the project, it helps me learn about how students experienced it and provides me with ideas for future revisions. The survey asks students to reflect on the flood mitigation options they learned about, including the social/cultural, environmental, and economic negatives and positives of each option, as well as which option they think is best and why. They also reflect on the three interviews that they conducted, which were as much about educating the local community about flood mitigation options beyond just building a dam as they were about listening to the opinions of community members. They share whether they feel like they were heard during the interviews, if they helped any of the people they interviewed understand climate injustice and other mitigation options, and whether any of the interviewees changed their minds on mitigation options or expressed interest in getting more involved with the issue. Students are also asked whether any of the following increased as a result of learning about climate justice in the course: their knowledge and perspectives on climate justice, their knowledge about flooding in their area and connections between flooding and climate justice, their desire to take other courses that feature climate justice, their belief that they have the power to make a positive difference in the world, their hope for the future, their desire to take action on climate justice issues, their knowledge of civic engagement, and their desire to participate in civic engagement in their community.

Climate Justice Project Wrap-up

Chehalis_Climate Justice Project Wrap-Up.pdf (Acrobat (PDF) 111kB Jun17 24)

Most of the students who take my class live locally and have had direct experience with flooding in their lifetimes. During Step 1, I ask students during a class discussion to share their stories if they have been affected by flooding; they love sharing their stories! Although this step could also be done asynchronously and online, such as an assignment before the class session in Step 2 where students answer these questions on a discussion board, I highly recommend doing this in person and in the classroom. The students are very interested because it is a problem that affects them directly. Our college has been affected by flooding as well. As recently as 2022, encroaching floodwaters required us to quickly evacuate the campus. So it is not only the students who are engaged, but our college is supportive of the work as well. Our college was so excited about this work that we were featured in our college's Spring 2024 Course Catalog: Recognition on College Course Catalog.docx (Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx) 2.9MB Jun9 24). This illustrates the importance and power of focusing on local issues impacting the community served by your college.

The class discussion during Step 2 is very important to carry out during class time, so that you can provide immediate feedback to students on the three mitigation options they will present to community members as well as the negatives and positives of each option. The first time I implemented this activity in my class, I found that a few of the students had presented the wrong mitigation options to community members. (The options given in the High Water video are different from the options given in the Chehalis Basin Long-Term Strategy, which contain more sustainable and equitable options and are the ones I want them to present to community members.) As a result, it may be risky to have students submit their answers to these questions as an assignment, without the class discussion component, because written feedback on such an assignment may be less likely to reach them. By having a class discussion and grading individual student answers to the class discussion afterward, I have two opportunities as an instructor to ensure (as best I can) that all students will disseminate the correct information to community members. Another way to ensure that students are disseminating accurate information to community members would be for you to ask them to submit a draft of their informational resource to you, ahead of time, and then you can provide appropritate feedback, if needed.

Depending on your students and the structure of your course, it might help to have due dates in the academic term for Steps 4, 5, and 6, in order to ensure that students don't try to complete everything at the last minute at the very end of the quarter. I do not have structured due dates to scaffold these last three steps because some students like to finish these steps well before the end of the quarter and I don't want to influence their desire to complete the work early by having due dates show up on our course calendar. Sometimes, when due dates are structured in this way, students think that there is a reason they have to wait to complete the different steps (i.e., certain class content needs to be presented first) whereas, in reality, they can complete the steps as soon as they desire.

Prior to their research on climate justice (Step 3) and creating an information resource to share (Step 4), students have already learned in my class how to search a library or research database to find information and how to evaluate the credibility of an information source using the CRAAP test (Currency, Relevancy, Authority, Accuracy, Purpose). Also, during the first week of the quarter when the scientific method is covered in the class, I spend a lot of time talking with students about how to recognize pseudoscience (e.g., no peer review) and how to use the scientific method to disprove it. Students practice finding and evaluating information sources prior to this activity, when they collect and present information about volcanoes, so I have already had a chance to evaluate their ability to find and evaluate credible sources of information. This is an important component of this activity because, when they interview community members and present them with information (Step 5), they want to know their information sources are credible in case they are asked about them.

For Step 5, it is important to emphasize to students that they need to interview community members who live in the community and who have been affected by flooding, especially for out-of-town students who are living in residence halls on campus. I have found that, when I do not do this, some students end up interviewing their roommates or people on their college sports teams, who are also from out of town. This happened a lot the first time I implemented this activity in my class and, since then, I have taken informal measures when interacting with students during class and laboratory sessions, to ensure they are interviewing the right people, that is, people who live in this watershed. During the class discussion in Step 1, when students respond to Question 4 and tell me their story, I am able to identify and make note of students who are not "locals." A more formal way to ensure that students are interviewing the appropriate people could be to ask students to submit an assignment, perhaps three to four weeks before the end of the quarter, in which they describe whom they will interview and why (for example). A formal due date for an assignment like this might also help students who are not local residents to start planning ahead by contacting the people they will interview and setting up time to meet for the interview, which is not something that local students may need to do as they may be able to interview family members or members of other local communities (e.g., people at the places they work, their churches, their neighbors).

1. Describe factors that lead to increased flooding (e.g., floodplain loss, urbanization, deforestation, and climate change) and natural disasters.

I assess this learning goal using Question 1(a) on the "Documentary Class Discussion.docx" Word file. My assessment is both formative for the class as a whole during the class discussion (Step 1), as well as summative for individual students based on the answers they write to this question and turn into me at the end of the class session for a grade. Students have a chance to revise and finalize their answer to this question during class based on feedback I give them during the class discussion.

2. Describe, explain, and illustrate the natural and artificial causes of river flooding and the connection of flooding to atmospheric phenomena.

I assess this learning goal using Question 1(b) on the "Documentary Class Discussion.docx" Word file. My assessment is both formative for the class as a whole during the class discussion (Step 1), as well as summative for individual students based on the answers they write to this question and turn into me at the end of the class session for a grade. Students have a chance to revise and finalize their answer to this question during class based on feedback I give them during the class discussion.

3. Identify the disproportionate effects of flooding and flood mitigation on marginalized communities.

I assess this learning goal using Questions 2 and 3 on the "Climate Justice Project Class Discussion.docx" Word file. My assessment is both formative for the class as a whole during the class discussion (Step 2), as well as summative for individual students based on the answers they write to this question and turn into me at the end of the class session for a grade. Students have a chance to revise and finalize their answer to this question during class based on feedback I give them during the class discussion. I also assess this during Part 2 of the project (see "Climate Justice Project.docx" Word file) by observing the information about climate justice and the social/cultural, economic, and environmental negatives and positives that they include on their informational flier. Finally, I assess this at the very end of the project with Questions 3 through 8 during their reflection on the project in Step 6 (see the "Climate Justice Project Wrap-Up.pdf" file).

4. Describe the meaning of climate justice from an individual and personal perspective.

I also assess this during Parts 1 and 2 of the project (see "Climate Justice Project.docx" Word file) by evaluating their initial definition of climate justice in their own words (Part 1) and then observing the information they include about what climate justice means to them and the social/cultural, economic, and environmental negatives and positives that they include on their informational flier (Part 2).

5. Conduct interviews and educational outreach with community members affected by flooding.

I assess that they have done this properly using the interview results students submit to me on Canvas (the LMS I use for this project). I allow students to submit videos, audio files, and/or written notes of the interviews.

6. Create a flyer, handout, poster, brochure, social media post, video, zine, or WordPress site that presents information to a public audience.

I assess that they have done this properly using the information resources that students created, which they submit to me in person or on Canvas (the LMS I use for this project).

7. Reflect on the effectiveness of educational outreach efforts implemented by interviewing community members and sharing information.

I assess this at the very end of the project with Questions 11 through 14 during their reflection on the project in Step 6 (see the "Climate Justice Project Wrap-Up.pdf" file).

High Water: Ten Years Later (28 minutes, documentary)

State Environmental Policy Act, Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), Proposed Chehalis River Basin Flood Damage Reduction Project (2020)

"Restoration of China Creek: Water Storages and Fish Environmental Project," presented as a poster in 2016 by Ramboll Environmental, pdf version of this: China Creek Poster March 2016.pdf (Acrobat (PDF) 19.4MB Jun11 24)

Proposed Dam on Washington's Upper Chehalis River, Frequently Asked Questions (July 2019, Quinault Indian Nation)

Chehalis River Basin Flood Damage Reduction Project, NEPA Environmental Impact Statement, Executive Summary, U.S. Amry Corps of Engineers, Seattle District, September 2020, pages ES-10 and ES-11.

Restoration Toolbox (Chelan Basin Strategy, 2022)

Resources for Basin Residents (Chelan Basin Strategy, 2022)

Chehalis River Basin Flood Control Zone District (website)

Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) (website)

National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) (website)

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (website)

Chehalis River Basin Flood Authority (website)

Chelhalis River Basin Flood Control Zone District (FCZD) (website)

Chehalis Basin Long-Term Strategy (website)

Collaboration is Key: How people are working together to restore river habitat in the Chehalis Basin (video)

The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration (2023, book by Jake Bittle)