Water and Society: Interdisciplinary Education in Natural Resources

Abstract

Natural resource management and education must account for both the natural and human components of a complex system, yet examples of such interdisciplinary approaches are still relatively rare, especially in education. This study discusses a graduate seminar on water management, developed from an interdisciplinary National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. The seminar applied constructivist pedagogy which is not only best suited for interdisciplinary work, but also allows flexibility to redesign the course components and deliverables after each evaluation cycle. While the seminar was a successful experiment, several challenges remain when implementing such courses. These challenges include not only the organization and assessment of course deliverables, but also fitting such courses into the administrative structure of the university when represented disciplines are located in several colleges across campus.

Empowering the Next Generation of Watershed Decision-Makers: A Pedagogical Design

“…Policy in the US (and elsewhere) currently assumes that watershed managers have the skills and knowledge to be able to facilitate these participatory approaches effectively [49,50], but that is not generally the case. To effectively facilitate collaboration and participation, watershed leaders must incorporate social science [51], a domain neglected in most natural resource academic programs [27].…”

“…Constructivist learning approaches knowledge as a malleable concept formed by experience [31]. Although experiential learning in water-resource programs is widely accepted and practiced at the graduate level [37], curriculum designs that meet the interdisciplinary demands of natural-resource management have yet to take hold [27]. Institutions of higher education face growing responsibility to produce professionals capable of operating within dynamic social and environmental systems [25], helping emerging professionals develop the adaptive skills to manage for an unknown future [25].…”

“…Finally, each person revises and submits a final document intended to represent a transmittal to the watershed board. Our assessment approach was similar to that used by [27]; skill development was assessed via reflective writing assignments and presentations that were graded by standard rubrics using Bloom's taxonomy of learning domains.…”

Changing Student Conceptions of Arid, Urban Watershed Management

“…Experiential learning activities are commonly advocated for and implemented in graduate level water resources programs (McIntosh and Taylor ; Kulcsar et al ), as well as in upper division undergraduate coursework (Campana ; Dennison and Oliver ; Missingham and McIntosh ). For instance, a field methods undergraduate capstone course took students to Honduras to design a sanitary water delivery system for a community (Campana ).…”

Revisiting Graduate Student Training to Address Agricultural and Environmental Societal Challenges

“…The endgame of these courses is for students to apply knowledge gained to dissertation research, ensuring that experiments are conceived in an interactive, collaborative environment. Indeed, seminar series and “workshop” courses have proven effective at uniting student interdisciplinary curricula (Kulcsar et al, 2016, Leuba et al, 2014, Mobley et al, 2013, Moslemi et al, 2009). Finally, incentivization of collaborative research with a small (∼$1,000–5,000) grants program allows cooperating students to write collaborative proposals to gain support for their research, and enhance their professional development (Moslemi et al, 2009).…”