WATER DIARIES, A JOURNEY OF OBSERVATION AND DISCOVERY

The project involved twelve fourth and fifth classes from three primary schools in Milan, to experiment with a series of workshops and a new teaching tool.

Climate change is becoming an increasingly relevant issue in people’s lives, with tangible impacts also in the Italian context. Until not so long ago, they were perceived as something distant in time and space, thus hindering a full understanding of the phenomenon. Today, more and more people are instead directly affected by these changes. One example of this phenomenon is the way in which the water cycle has changed and how the availability of this resource has changed for people and ecosystems. In order to be aware of the effects of the climate crisis at a local level, it is first necessary to re-know the environment that surrounds us, be it the neighbourhood of a large city or a rural landscape; to understand the balances, the relationships between elements, the cycles that make it up, the role of human action, but also of animals, plants and other elements that animate it.

With the project The Water Diaries we have opened up a reflection on the interrelationships between human beings and nature, which is also present in the urban environment, albeit hidden. In our daily lives, we open and close taps from which water comes out, we heat our homes with gas boilers, we breathe the air with oxygen and pollutants. We hardly recognize these aspects of the environment as nature and tend not to give them any special attention. That is why we started from these very elements for our observations.

In the course of an entire four-month course, teachers, children and pupils developed skills to read the phenomena related to the climate and water crisis on a local level, in its material and scientific, but also social and cultural aspects, contextualized in the broader context of climate change and the complexity of relations between humans and the environment. 

We began with training sessions for teachers, followed by a discussion and co-design of the course to be carried out with the classes. We started off with a field trip for a ‘water network hunt’ around the schools, guided by the experts, at the end of which there was the handing out of the Water Diaries and cards with ideas for activities to be carried out in the following two months in the classroom and at home. The children continued the journey with the support of their teachers and the involvement of families and acquaintances for some research, especially historical reconstruction on climate and rainfall in past decades. 

But what are these Water Diaries?

Part laboratory notebook, part field diary, they symbolize the interdisciplinary nature of the project: a tool for observation and data collection using methods characteristic of both the social sciences and the natural sciences, consisting of cards that can be used modularly by the teachers, depending on the needs and rhythms of the class. The proposed activities span several subjects, from science to Italian, and provide ideas for further investigation and connections between the different subjects. They are also suitable for use in civic education and for developing transversal skills. 

Our experts pulled the strings of the observations in two successive workshops with each class, during which the boys and girls produced ‘talking maps’ of their neighborhoods, which convey the richness of the group’s observations and discoveries. The maps were designed to be exhibited and to become a tool for sharing their experience with other classes in the school, with families, with the inhabitants of the neighborhood, thus initiating new dialogues around climate change, its effects on our lives and what we can do to combat it, as individuals and as a community.

The I Diari dell’acqua project, co-funded by Fondazione Cariplo as part of the My Future 2023 call for proposals, was the result of interdisciplinary teamwork, combining the STEM and social science skills of Eliante and Italian Climate Network with the civic participation of Parteciprato. A downloadable version of the teaching tool will soon be available online on the Eliante and Italian Climate Network websites.