Initial Publication Date: December 2, 2016
Meghann Jarchow: Using An Ecosystems Services Approach to Water Resources in Sustainability and Society at University of South Dakota
About this Course
One of two core, introductory courses (200-level) for a sustainability major and minor; course also fulfills a social science general education requirement.
22
students
Three 50-minute lecture sessions per week
Sustainability & Society syllabus (Acrobat (PDF) 454kB Jun21 16)
This course will examine how science seeks to answer questions and how it can be used to address sustainability-related issues including climate change as well as energy production and use.
Course learning outcomes:
- Students will describe what climate change and ecosystem services are.
- Students will describe how climate change, ecosystem services, energy, and the built environment are related to sustainability.
- Students will utilize a systems-thinking approach in assessing sustainability topics.
- Students will appraise group/team dynamics and personality styles better.
- Students will identify an area of sustainability about which they are passionate.
- Students will identify opportunities for how they can effect change.
- Students will identify appropriate sources of information for sustainability issues.
Using models to frame public discussions
My course is one of two introductory, core courses for a sustainability major and minor. The course focuses on the environmental aspects of sustainability and is taught using team-based learning methods. My goals for the course include teaching students how to use some of the many scientific tools that have been developed for the public and teaching students how to translate the output from those tools into forms that can be used to effect positive environmental change. This module was an effective way to combine these two goals.
Watersheds and the hydrologic cycle are especially clear examples of systems. Through this module my students learned basic systems terminology and how systems can be modeled.
My Experience Teaching with InTeGrateMaterials
I made only limited modifications to the module. My primary modifications were editing the PowerPoint presentations to fit my presentation style and reinforce content previously discussed in the course.
Relationship of InTeGrate Materials to my Course
My course was arranged into four modules. This module was taught as the third module of the course, after the climate change and energy modules and before the built environment module. This module built upon systems terminology introduced earlier in the course and built upon the summative assessments of the previous two modules where the students gave group presentations to the class.
I implemented this module very closely to our instructor descriptions. Below are descriptions of specific changes that I made to each module.
Unit 1
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Unit 1.1: In the In-class PowerPoint, I did not use the from-the-ground pictures that corresponded to the Google Earth imagery. I did not think that I would have enough class time to get through all of the material (which ended up being correct), so I decided to cut these slides out. I did not do either of the "additional practice" slides. I did not have as much time as I would have liked for the students to present back to the class for the summary/wrap-up. Because of this, I did not provide much oral feedback to the teams about their presentations or findings.
- Unit 1.2: I modified the PowerPoint to better fit my presentation style and the previous course material. We had previously discussed systems, so I presented the hydrologic cycle and watersheds using the systems terminology that we had discussed previously in the course. I also focused on how we would be modeling the hydrologic cycle. For the assessment, rather than doing a one-minute paper and the homework, I included the one-minute paper as a question on the homework. I also did not require the students to use Excel to graph the rainfall-runoff data for Big Creek watershed because we had not used Excel in the course previously. I provided them with the graph and asked them to calculate the amount of water stored in the soil or evapotranspired.
- Unit 1.3: I modified the PowerPoint to better fit my presentation style. I did not go into detail about the land-cover classes.
Unit 2
- Unit 2.1: I modified the PowerPoint to better fit my presentation style and the previous course material (i.e. I focused on the modeling and understanding systems). I will describe this more below, but I had problems with the students downloading the EPA Stormwater Calculator. I had intended for the students to do this unit in class, but instead I ended class early and told them to do the "Stormwater calculator tutorial 1" outside of class. This did not go well because most students did not do it, so then they had a poorer understanding of the stormwater calculator when we used it the next class period. Because I had planned on having the students complete the tutorial in class, I did not require them to turn in Table 1 from the tutorial.
- Unit 2.2: I modified the PowerPoint to better fit my presentation style. I did not do the "think-pair-share" question about campus because I spent more time catching the students up from what we would have done as wrap up/summary in class at the end of class for Unit 2.1. Rather than requiring students to complete the Unit 2.2 assessment, I offered them extra credit for completing it. Therefore, fewer students completed it.
- Unit 2.3: I had the students complete the assessment (Unit 2.3 assessment) in class as a team. Due to time limitations, most of the assessments were not complete.
Unit 3
- Unit 3.1: I created a PowerPoint to frame the mind mapping in terms of previous course material (and material from my course last semester, which at least one student in each team had taken).
- Unit 3.2: I did not modify this unit.
Assessments
I had my students complete almost all of the formative assessments described in the module, which ended up being a lot of assessments for the students to complete and for me to grade. In the future, I would not assign all of the formative assessments. I assigned the summative assessment as described. Because my students had been doing similar summative assessments for previous modules, this assessment worked well in my course.
Outcomes
Students often think that modeling is necessarily abstract and mathematically complex. Through this module, I hope that my students were able to realize (1) that there are many different ways to do modeling and (2) that there are many tools that have been developed to allow the public to use relatively complex models to quantitatively evaluate environmental processes.
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