Zooming in on water education

Kruger (2020) described the use of mini-sass in an Eco-Schools project in which learners found the river to be so devastatingly polluted they took it upon themselves to draft a letter of recommendation to the Human Rights Commission. This study highlighted the way in which critical thinking cultivated by the teachers at the school enabled the confidence for self- directed learning exhibited in the expansion of this mini-sass exercise into the political sphere. It also resulted in connections between the school and the surrounding community on the matter of water pollution.

A common thread in these studies also sheds light on the dynamics between educators and learner participants in environmental monitoring projects. Hoffman worked in school environmental audits, many of which were focused on water and noted that the learning potential from environmental audits is connected to “teachers’ intentions, knowledge and skills, choreography of the audit, nature of the teaching and learning interactions, and ways in which teachers and learners engaged with the findings” (Hoffman, 2005, p. iii). The role of the teacher mattered significantly in guiding learners through inquiry phases of data

collection, analysis, and discussion towards “appropriate responses for social and ecological transformation” (2005).

Shifting away from river monitoring, there has been research into the use of creative modes for water education projects. The schools water awareness programme (SWAP) facilitated the study of a catchment through engagement with the mode of story – including subject

knowledge, indigenous knowledge and the learners’ own situated knowledge about the catchment (Masuku, 1999). Masuku’s study showed interesting insights into how the engagement on reading and writing of story enabled a shift in teacher learner relations allowing learners to bring experiential knowledge into conversation with classroom based knowledge.

Impey’s (2006) study, through exploring the use of traditional songs and mapping significant places, brought cultural and historical dimensions into a process of environmental learning. A series of workshops on musical constructions of place connected cultural knowledge about the environment around the significant watery space of St. Lucia wetland. Educators were involved in these deliberative workshops which enabled a “more expansive and culturally resonant understanding of environmental education” (Impey, 2006, p. 102)

All these studies in the field of Southern African environmental education have significant potential for building public knowledge about water in Mzantsi. Mini-sass has the potential to

enable a nation-wide citizen-led water monitoring practice, with benefits of learning as well as accountability for our water reserves. Working with indigenous knowledge and story builds capacity of learners to engage and represent their home catchments in relation to historical, cultural and science-based knowledge. The outraged response to mini-sass results from a polluted river drove learners to practice acts of voicing into formal governance structures responsible for human rights. The educators and researchers involved in these studies are eco-pedagogistas in their own right and one day I would like to write a book about them.

There is transformative potential illustrated in these studies, particularly in connecting what is learned across them about pedagogy. The potential includes transgressing hegemonic

relationships between teachers and learners by honouring the knowledge learners bring to the process (Masuku, 1999). It also has transformative potential in transgressing the boundaries of the science academy, building laboratories in the context (Vallabh et al., 2016).

Significantly, there is final transformative potential in the moves that actively transgress disciplines and scales for understanding water. The shifting curve of learning from simply being concerned with the facts towards thinking about how scientific literacies of water connect with mechanisms in social, economic and political systems is a significant move towards intersectional literacies of water that consider how the context is shaped at different scales (Vallabh et al., 2016; Kruger, 2020).

There is little discussed in these studies, however, about pedagogical practice and strategies for integrating water science knowledge with socio-political literacies that might build more rigorous analyses of the root causes of water and environmental crisis. This could be

articulated as the strategies that maintain and enable the transformative potential identified above.

Realising the potential of a nationwide public water monitoring programme, for example, requires significant collective action and the social learning work relating to establishing institutional muscle. This is especially so in a country where collectively we have been depoliticised and stripped of our capacity to collectively organise and play a role in the decisions affecting our lives. The absence of this was illustrated in the expansive learning case study by Burt and Lusithi (2017). This is part of an increasing neoliberal logic

conceiving of people as consumers of water and customers of the state (as is evidenced in the draft water policy of the city of Cape Town City of Cape Town, 2019b). Despite these

considerations being in the context of adult and community education, ‘learning for participatory democracy’ in relation to water should be built into modes of engaging and learning about water with children and youth who live in these communities too.

This brings me to articulate another generative absence in connections on water education research. As much of the movement of water is dictated by the historical material evolution of colonial capitalism ( Salleh, 2018; Shiva, 2002; Swyngedouw, Kaika and Castro, 2002;), there need for “radical social learning-centred transformation in relation to sustainability concerns” (Lotz-Sisitka et al., 2015, p. 73). In her discussion of disruptive pedagogy with second-year university studies, Gillespie argued for pedagogical strategies that can address

“systems of commodification … – [such as] advertising, mass media, malls, disappearing public spaces – and to begin to identify strategies for disrupting, refusing and resisting the commodity form and the structures of privacy it produces and informs” (2012, p. 39). As teachers, who are so pivotal to the direction and orientation of environmental learning, we need to work more rigorously on pedagogical strategies that can enable learners to work with a plurality of knowledge types, alongside a consideration of the relationship between power and knowledge.

Honouring the significant practice and reflection on water education in Southern Africa, it is clear that there are significant approaches and understandings to be taken up in situated and relevant learning about water for both sharing it and restoring it. There is room for this work to expand, however. One such expansion includes joining together water education projects with strong foundations in science literacies with anti-capitalist and anti-colonial and

disruptive pedagogical praxis. This is a conceptual platform around which scientists, activists, politicians and community members can sit around a collective curriculum table, towards reading water in the world.

2.6.2 Reading water in the curriculum

I have scoped water education projects in the environmental education literature. I now briefly review where water features in the CAPS curriculum documents. This is relevant because, as discussed in section 2.3, the curriculum plays a role in mediating teaching and learning, both in and out of school, and thus what is included in the curriculum should be considered for its link to practice.

Scanning the CAPS documents for water content gives some clues as to how water is positioned in the curriculum. Of course, this does not tell us anything about what happens inside the classroom. However, it is relevant to the concern for the emergence of implicit pedagogical cultures regarding water and how these cultures come into play with sense- making processes in the inquiries of this research.

Water content topics exist prominently within Geography, Life Sciences and Life

Orientation. Geography takes a broad view examining river systems, atmospheric processes and human settlement, urban space, and resource distribution. This is predominantly

technical. Life Sciences takes a micro view looking at the importance of water for human, animal and plant bodies. A consideration of human impacts on the environment is the exception.

Life Sciences includes interconnections of water, but they remain largely in the context of the biosphere and in relation to biotic and abiotic elements.

Life Orientation makes the links between water, environmental justice, and social life. This section falls under the heading of ‘environmental responsibility’. Environmental

responsibility is reduced to a messaging and ideological moral culture. This subject holds potential for thinking about water in terms of ecological citizenship.

Economics does not include ‘water’. However it does cover ‘natural resources’ which includes land, forestry, fishery, minerals and mining. While water is not mentioned, it is critical to all of these areas. This is a glaring absence. In connection with the concern for contradictory economic principles in the curriculum (Schudel and Lotz-Sisitka, 2006), the side-lining of water is a particular example of how the economics curriculum prioritises particular topics, which are then the focus of teaching.

Water is located within the curriculum but separated into separate subjects. There is a breadth of water related concerns from geomorphology in Geography to water in the body in Life Sciences. However straddling different subjects, there is little concern for the contradictions that emerge between them and this obstructs understanding the socio-ecology of water.

2.6.3 Section summary

This section has examined the pedagogical dimensions reflected upon in the literature on water education projects in South Africa and the existence of water in the curriculum as a

way of understanding what is known and understood by the practice of water education in the South African context. Water pedagogies stretch between school and community education contexts and are informed by institutional cultures and social relations and can be

transformed through a disruption of institutionalised power relations. Because water exists in and as complex social ecologies, it is by requiring multiple literacies towards understanding it, that one can best understand the pedagogies in situated social-cultural-ecological and political life.