Water: An Interdisciplinary Journey
Location
Dolan School of Business
Start Date
29-5-2014 5:00 PM
End Date
29-5-2014 6:15 PM
Session Type
Poster Presentation
Description
Dr. Bayers and Steffen developed and delivered an interdisciplinary upper division honors course on water in the Fall 2013. Why Water? Why Now? And What did we do? This poster will present an overview of how the course was developed, what we had students do, and how they responded. Water is essential for life. Water can bring horrible death and destruction. Water is both everywhere and invisible in our modern world. This course explored the nature of water as a physical substance (Why does NASA spend millions looking everywhere for it?) and as a metaphor for living. Weaving together political science (who owns water?), literature (Hetch Hetchy, Land of Little Rain, sacred texts), cinema (NOVA-Earth From Space, Rango, others), and field trips to local watersheds, this course challenged students to come to a deeper understanding of how critical water is for human civilization and how viewing it from different perspectives allows for a fuller understanding of its importance. We will describe how the course was structured, challenges we faced, and the student response to this course.
Topic Designation
Teaching & Learning
Presenter Bio(s)
L. Kraig Steffen
Associate Professor of Chemistry and Chair
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Fairfield University
Peter Bayers
Associate Professor of English
Fairfield University
Water: An Interdisciplinary Journey
Dolan School of Business
Dr. Bayers and Steffen developed and delivered an interdisciplinary upper division honors course on water in the Fall 2013. Why Water? Why Now? And What did we do? This poster will present an overview of how the course was developed, what we had students do, and how they responded. Water is essential for life. Water can bring horrible death and destruction. Water is both everywhere and invisible in our modern world. This course explored the nature of water as a physical substance (Why does NASA spend millions looking everywhere for it?) and as a metaphor for living. Weaving together political science (who owns water?), literature (Hetch Hetchy, Land of Little Rain, sacred texts), cinema (NOVA-Earth From Space, Rango, others), and field trips to local watersheds, this course challenged students to come to a deeper understanding of how critical water is for human civilization and how viewing it from different perspectives allows for a fuller understanding of its importance. We will describe how the course was structured, challenges we faced, and the student response to this course.