Swechha SearchAct

← Water, Water, Everywhere

Gray, Green, Blue: Water Security

What it takes to keep water running in a growing city, and who does that work — read off a set of photographs.

What you need

The eight photographs described at the end of this session, printed as cards. Optional video: https://youtu.be/VXT9O1LWaw8 (3:59)

The manual states these. What it does not state is not here.

How it runs

The teaching sequence as the manual gives it.

  1. 01

    Print the photographs as cards and make up a set for each group. Photographs of your own city work better, if you can find them — a tanker on a street, a queue at a handpump, an overhead tank, a dry tank bed, a foaming drain, a lawn being watered at noon.

  2. 02

    Put the class into groups.

  3. 03

    Their job is to sort the cards into categories. The categories are theirs to invent.

  4. 04

    Do not suggest any. They may use as many as they like, but they have to justify each one — why that category, and why that photograph inside it. Groups usually land on things like nature, people, people and nature, animals, resources, work.

  5. 05

    Give them about ten minutes to sort the cards and agree their reasons.

  6. 06

    Each group picks one person to present its categories and its reasoning.

  7. 07

    Write the categories on the board as they come. When every group has presented, discuss what the board shows.

Talking about it

Discussion points, worked examples and the handouts the manual prints with this session.

Points for discussion

  • Which photographs were hardest to place, and why?
  • Did the groups sort them the same way? Where did they differ most?
  • What decides how you read a photograph — where you live, what you have already seen, who you are?
  • Then give them the term. People, businesses, industry, farming, transport, waste removal, festivals, gardens and buildings all need water. Making sure there is enough clean, reliable water for people and for the land around them is what water security means, and it is one of the hardest things a city has to do.

The photographs. They were all taken outside India, so use local ones instead wherever you can.

Photo 1: A private tanker fills from a local well and delivers to homes in La Florida, Guatemala City, Guatemala.

Photo 2: Holding tanks at a treatment plant that supplies half the drinking water of São Paulo, Brazil.

Photo 3: Men filling large containers at a water station in Nairobi, Kenya, to deliver to homes and businesses, because the piped supply cannot be relied on.

Photo 4: A woman scoops water from the Potomac River with her hands, Maryland, United States. Photo 5: A farmer and his daughter on the Flint River in Georgia, United States, which supplies drinking water to thousands of people; he is changing how he irrigates in order to use less of it. Photo 6: The Verde River in Arizona, United States, which irrigates farms and supplies drinking water to the Phoenix area. Demand has left some stretches of it almost dry.

Photo 7: Two men in Jarabacoa, Dominican Republic, testing water before and after it passes through an artificial wetland built to filter it.

Photo 8: A woman washes clothes in the Ayampe River, Manabí Province, Ecuador. The river does far more than its ecological job — the communities along it live off it.

Where this comes from

Bridge the Gap is a compilation. This is what the manual records for this session.

The manual prints no source for this session. It is published here as Swechha has used it, adapted over years of classroom work; if you recognise its origin, tell us and we will credit it.

Before you start sets out where the compendium as a whole comes from.

Next

Where to go from here.

Next session

Exposure WalksWater, Water, Everywhere, 8 of 8

The theme

Water, Water, Everywhere8 sessions and the background reading

All eight themes

Teach43 sessions across 8 themes

Understand the data

The whole library · the A to Z