Harvard Gazette: "Water crisis, made clear"
Earlier this month, the CMES Outreach Center, along with six other Harvard area studies centers and programs, and the Harvard Global Health Institute, conducted a four-day workshop for K-12 educators titled "Teaching Water: Global Perspectives on a Resource in Crisis."
The Harvard Gazette covered the August 5–8 workshop in a recent article:
The collaboration of the regional centers and programs provides a global perspective to teachers that might be missing if only one organization presented the material, according to Cris Martin, outreach director of the Davis Center. That’s important, Martin said, because classroom teachers at the middle and high school level are often concerned about globe-spanning issues and less with how that issue would impact one region.
“Water is the new oil,” Martin said. “Everybody’s thinking about water, which is good news because there are a lot of resources out there.”
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The four-day workshop ran from Aug. 5 to 8 and covered topics that included water and world health, shortages on the Arabian peninsula, water security, piracy, Ethiopia’s plan for a grand dam, access to water as a human right, and water and climate change.
Speakers included several Harvard faculty members, as well as presenters from other institutions, including two master teachers, Gretchen Roorbach and Scott Chelist, who presented a session on developing K-12 curricula.
“It’s been pretty spectacular,” said Marianne Marks, who teaches seventh-grade biology at Oak Hill Middle School in Newton. Marks said she talks about waterborne diseases in her class as a way to make discussions of microbes seem more real to students. It’s important for today’s students to understand the issues around water, she said, because theirs is the generation that will face the crisis more squarely.
“They’re going to be the ones to step up to the plate,” Marks said.