Engaging With Experiential Learning and Water Education in the Field

“Where does your water come from?” is a question I’ve been asking a lot this summer. 

We interact with water every day, but we are often geographically isolated from where our water comes from, the environmental and economic costs of delivering it, and the legal and physical infrastructure that ensures water security, sustainable use, and resilience. Water education is one of the most important tools we have to fill in the gap, and because water systems are so complex and tied to place, experiential learning is a crucial part of water education because it allows us to see how systems actually work versus how the rules say they should work.

Through my studies in the Environmental Policy and Management graduate group, I’ve focused on honing science communication and my educational background to share technical, applied and practice-based water knowledge with water professionals and with the general public. 

Over the summer, I worked with the Water Management Lab, led by Dr. Samuel Sandoval-Solis, to help facilitate the California Water Course. The goal of the course is to empower community leaders, water activists and early-career professionals by sharing with them practical, hands-on and technical knowledge. The bilingual course delivers material through a hybrid model that blends in-person instruction, virtual lectures, and three water system assessment modules.

The first thing I learned about planning experiential learning is to expect surprises. We guessed about 35 participants would sign up to take the course, and we ended up with a cohort of more than 80 people. In August, we had more than 70 participants travel from across California to participate in a field day, which included tours of local groundwater wells, a CIMIS (California Irrigation Management Information System) station, and Putah Creek near UC Davis. Because participants represented a wide range of disciplines, the day was filled with many perspectives, starting with a “First Nations First” presentation from the California Indian Water Commission. 

“Where does your water come from?” depends on context and history, where you are located and how you use water. Asking that question over and over can also help us think about where we might be going. As a student in EPM, I have seen how experiential learning can enhance learning outcomes by bridging what happens in the field with what we learn in the classroom. 

In May, I was selected to participate in the Climate Adaptation Science Academy Experiential Learning Expedition (CASA ELE), a 10-day field program bringing together graduate students from universities across the West and with backgrounds spanning disciplines, including policy, engineering, and hydrogeology. As part of the trip, we visited sites in the Upper Colorado River Basin — at the center of contemporary disputes over allocating water in the West — and rafted the Yampa River, the last major free-flowing tributary of the Colorado River.

I was excited before I left, and when I got back from the trip, my friends asked me how it went. I said “life-changing.” They rolled their eyes. But on some level, I really meant it. The four days of rafting was the first opportunity I had to see a river from the level of the river, day in and day out. 

Being on the river made the stakes feel real, and so too did the perspectives I picked up along the way about how to balance competing priorities, demands, and tradeoffs in a world where there is less water to go around, in a world where historic decisions — path dependencies — seem to weigh on everything. I left with hope, though, in no small part because of the cohort I was with (we are currently working on a collaborative paper about the trip). Each of us came in with our disciplinary view, but as each day went by, we came to experience the river through new lenses, as a holistic system, rather than one that should be broken down into categories.

My friend Kira put it best. It was almost as though the complex water systems that govern the question “Where does your water come from” behaved like a watershed itself. With all of these inputs (creeks and springs and tributaries) feeding into and informing one large system (a river).

“Where does your water come from?” The best place to answer that question is in the field.

The views, opinions and recommendations expressed in published in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Graduate Program of Environmental Policy and Management at UC Davis.