Saving Water on Campus

What you need

A projector, if you have one

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

How it runs

The teaching sequence as the manual gives it.

01

Start with last session's plans. Ask who has actually done something at home, and what happened. Credit the small ones — they are the ones that last.
02

Then scale it up. One person saving a bucket a day is a bucket. A whole school doing it is a tanker. Tell them this building gets through a great deal of water, and ask what would change if the students and the people who run the school both decided to cut it.
03

If you have a video of students running a water-saving campaign in their own school, show it. Any example will do. The point is that the people who fixed it were students.
04

Widen it again, to businesses. A factory, a hotel, a hospital or a mall uses water on a scale no household touches, directly and virtually, and every building it owns uses more. Put it to the class: if small changes to your own life add up, what would the same effort do inside an organisation that size?
05

A school is an organisation like that. So the next task is an audit of this one — finding the places where it could use less water, directly or virtually.
06

Students go back into the teams from last session, and each team audits the topic it already researched. Indoor water: the taps, the toilets, the cooler, the RO unit and what it throws away. Outdoor water: the garden, the ground, the vehicles, the overhead tank and whether it overflows. Food: the kitchen, what is cooked, what is thrown. Electricity: how much is used, because power and water are joined at the generating station. Buying habits: what the school buys, and how often it replaces it.
07

Give it the time it needs. An audit usually runs past one period and into time outside class, and the five teams will not finish together. Each team follows its own worksheet, measures what it can, and writes down what it found rather than what it assumed. Stay available while they plan — most of them have never done this before.
08

Then they pitch. Each team turns its audit into a proposal for the people who run the school: one or two changes the school could actually make, who has to agree, what it would cost, and how it would be paid for. Tie it to the poster campaign so it is one piece of work and not two. Approve the plans, then fix a time for the teams to present, separately or all together. If the school says yes to something, decide with the students how it gets done and how anyone will know it worked — a second audit some weeks later, held against the first, is the honest test. Split the class into sub-groups for the parts nobody enjoys: permissions, money, and persuading staff to change a habit. If time is short, audit one classroom instead of the whole school and scale the result up, then make the class argue about whether that scaling is fair. Inviting the person who actually runs the building — the caretaker, the plumber, the electrician — is worth more than any worksheet.

Talking about it

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

Points for discussion

Questions to close on:

Did your work reach more than one level? Explain. (Sample answer: yes. The campaign changes what individuals do, and the audit asks the school itself to change. And what students learn at school, they take home.)
What is the one thing you will remember from this? Explain. (Sample answer: how much of it turned out to be fixable, and how little of it anybody had looked at.)
What do you think of when you hear the word sustainability? Is it a good word to you, or does it sound like extra cost and extra work? Both answers are honest. Argue them out.
If you had to recommend one change to somebody at home, what would it be, and why that one? (Sample answer: switch the motor off before the tank overflows. It costs nothing, it takes no effort, and the water it saves is water somebody pumped out of the ground.)
Now take the other side. If your family's income came from growing paddy, how would you feel about a campaign telling people to eat less rice? What would have to change before you could switch crops? (Sample answer: badly, and for good reason. The buyer, the price, the pump, the electricity and the market are all built around the crop I already grow. Telling one farmer to change is useless. Changing what the system pays for is not.)

People talk about a business's bottom line, meaning whether it made money. The triple bottom line says a business should be judged three times over: on money, on people and on the environment. Ask the class what they make of that. (Sample answer: obviously better, and obviously harder. To an owner who is barely staying open, the other two lines feel like luxuries — which is exactly why this cannot be left to individual goodwill.)

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.

Where to go from here.

Next session

The Ocean and Plastic PollutionWater, Water, Everywhere, 6 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