Water is one of the key challenges that we face in the world today, currently in the Horn of Africa 10 million people are affected by the
lack of rains.
About 70% of an adult’s body is made up from water and each human being needs to maintain this balance to remain healthy so we need water to live. However although between 70% and 75% of the earth is covered in water, human beings can only use about 3/10ths of this amount – which means as the population of the earth increases, we need to think about how we manage our water resources to ensure that we can live, grow food and keep ourselves clean.
On the Global Dimension website; we have a range of
free resources that can help teachers engage students with the issue of water. These are great resources that can be used in a spare lesson or assembly at the end of term or as part of wider learning about water, poverty and climate change issues.
In addition teachers might want to consider whether a more solution-based approach could bring this issue to life with students.
I recently went on holiday to Nigeria (which is where I am from originally) and one of the main issues we have in Nigeria is access to clean, drinkable water. With a population of over 150 million, the country has a
water coverage rate of about 58%. This means that many people do not have access to clean water both in the cities and in the rural areas. I met up with a group of young people to discuss what they could do to improve the situation and I was more than a little disappointed to find that they believed that there was nothing they could do to change the situation. When we talked about their usage of water, it became clear that many of them were wasting water, yet none of them had considered that this wastage could affect the availability of water to other people. So I came up with an idea to get them to design water-saving ideas to limit the wastage of water.
I think this could also be a good way to teach about water in the UK. It is important that students realise that water is a global challenge that we all face. This means that our actions with water can affect other people’s access to water. There is a finite amount of water on the planet and that amount will not change so we need to think about how to ensure that every human being gets access to water to keep clean, to grow food and to stay alive.
So what did I do in Nigeria?
- I asked all the students to collect data about their water usage at home. We discussed what they used water for (cooking food, cleaning dishes, washing clothes, cleaning the car, sanitation etc) and they created a basic chart with all the activities and a column to collect the data next to each activity.
- Students went home to collect data on the amount of water that they used in their home for each activity. Some of the data collection was not exact but we were able to get a sense of how much water was used. Students were very creative in the ways they calculated the data (some measured out water for washing dishes, some used manufacturer’s data to work out how much was used by washing machines and dishwashers and some did some research on the internet)
- Students were then divided into teams to look at their data and try and analyse whether there was wastage in their homes on any of the activities listed. Students were given the opportunity to return to collect further data if the information they collected initially was not sufficient or satisfactory.
- Students were then asked to think about ideas to reduce any waste they had identified. These ideas were discussed in the group and presented to the whole class before the best 5 ideas were trialled in homes and data collected.
- The data was then analysed in the class and students were given the opportunity to revise or adapt any idea that they came up with.
This process gave students the opportunity to be creative and engage with the issue of water on a personal level and I found really embedded a lot of the learning and discussions that we had about the issue.
It would be great to hear your thoughts on whether this would work in your school and whether it would engage your students!
Additional resources: In June, Oxfam launched their
Water Week campaign in Scotland and next week, they will be encouraging students to learn about water and participate in water walks in England and Wales.