Science and Stewardship in the Creek: Multiple Pathways for Relating to Water

• In Event: Waterways and Pedagogical Entanglements: Teaching, Learning, and Relating to Water and Its Multiple Meanings

Abstract

This paper explores how learners come to know and care for water - in this case their local river - via informal science education. Specifically, this case study examines a community-based watershed monitoring initiative in Western Montana conceptualized as an environmental science education initiative situated in the broader context of river restoration and dam removal.
Dams are key infrastructure used to control and subdue river systems, and dam removal presents an opportunity to work toward the revitalization of human-river relation. Ecological restoration efforts benefit from the intentional incorporation of multiple perspectives, including but beyond that of normative science. And yet, normative science is often positioned of higher status than other forms of knowledge in ecological restoration to the degree that it constrains other ways of knowing from informing decision-making (Liboiron, 2022). This is particularly pronounced in conventional river restoration, where river science is bound up in the law, regulation, and management surrounding river futures (Wölfle Hazard, 2022).
The privileging of normative science in river restoration runs parallel to the privileging of normative science in teaching and learning spaces. When normative science is positioned as the primary and only acceptable way of orienting to the world, learning environments deny opportunities for more expansive repertoires of sensemaking. Disrupting these logics to embrace epistemological heterogeneity and multivoicedness is critical to the endeavor of “desettling” science education (Bang et al., 2012). This paper argues that such a shift can also facilitate more expansive human-river relationships.
Considering these perspectives, this paper examines how six high school students built relationships with the local river through their participation in community-based monitoring. Data sources include 1. ethnographic observations, with attention to interactions between human and more-than-human actors, and 2. semi-structured interviews conducted in situ to elicit emplaced data. A first pass of coding helped identify episodes in which learners were engaged with water, followed by a second pass in which these episodes were inductively coded to characterize these interactions. Cross-comparative analyses allowed for the distillation of key themes and patterns as to how learners built a relationship with water.
Findings indicate that there were multiple pathways through which learners initiated and deepened their relationships with water following dam removal. Importantly, participation in dominant science practices (collecting and recording data) supported some learners in developing a more intimate relationship with the river, which one student described “as forcing us to slow down and notice things we otherwise would’ve missed.” However, other activities and interactions - such as coming across snakes and frogs, taking breaks to swim, and nature journaling - similarly played an important role in this relationship-building, even more so than science practices for other learners.
This paper suggests that river science provides a useful but ultimately narrow frame for both environmental education and for ecological restoration, and that it is river science in tandem with other ways of knowing water (e.g. embodied engagement) that foster meaningful river-based relationships. This suggests that we design learning environments that foster multiple forms of engagement to provide mutually-reinforcing opportunities for revitalizing human-river relations.

Author

• Christopher Jadallah, University of California - Los Angeles