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KELSEY OFFUTT: What do you guys use water for every day? Raise your hand if you know something. What do you use water for?
KID: To make food and drink.
OFFUTT: To make food and drinks. Good job.
KID: To take showers.
OFFUTT: Take showers. Good.
KID: Clean cars.
OFFUTT: Clean cars.
KID: Make energy.
KID: If there’s only a little water that is good for us, then why do we use so much of it?
MADISON RIFFE: I think it's mostly because we don’t really understand how precious it is. Did you guys know that we’re using the same freshwater that the dinosaurs drank? (Yeah). You don't get any new freshwater on this planet, so...
DIANA MAZZELLA: What you just heard were scenes from this winter at Kenna Elementary School in Charleston, West Virginia. Kelsey Offutt and Madison Riffe are asking and answering questions from fourth and fifth graders as they tell the students about the properties, joys and tribulations of water. They have a big task to accomplish in very little time. The two West Virginia University juniors have about an hour to spark curiosity in science and the natural world, to teach the students some terms like PH -- which is a measure of acidity -- and help the students see how science is a West Virginian thing to do.
I’m Diana Mazzella, and you’re listening to Sparked, a podcast about the people changing Appalachia’s future. We are so excited to be back with our second season, and we’ve got an incredible lineup for you this spring, starting with the story of the West Virginia Science Public Outreach Team.
[Hear children talking in the background]
Riffe and Offutt are at Kenna Elementary right after their holiday break and before classes started back up at WVU because they are members of this team -- which is also known as SPOT. Three years ago, they signed up to learn a series of presentations and become ambassadors for science and the future of science to K-12 students across the state. Offutt is from nearby Huntington, West Virginia, and Riffe is from Charleston, and went to Kenna Elementary as a child, going to science camps and the science fair. She feels like she had a good exposure to science growing up but she didn’t really know about the science frontiers inside West Virginia.
RIFFE: I didn’t realize when I was growing up the sort of research that we’re presenting to the kids now. So, like I didn’t know that the Green Bank Observatory was as big and powerful and awesome as it is. I don’t know if I knew it existed. I don’t think I knew about the water research that they do thatwe’re presenting now. So, I would like to say that I knew a decent bit about it, but I definitely didn’t know about the things we’re telling them. So I would assume that I was definitely missing some of the cooler things.
MAZZELLA: The cooler things. Like science that’s being done by West Virginia researchers right now. I talked with Eric Merriam, a WVU researcher who designed the "Water: The Source of Life" presentation that the two students gave that day. It’s a part of the Appalachian Freshwater Initiative supported by the National Science Foundation. Merriam sprinkled hints about what researchers are doing inside the presentation, such as developing water sensors to identify pollution. Scientists are looking at ways to monitor stream health by tracking animal DNA in water without having to catch fish and invertebrates and measure them. They’re also creating predictive models to indicate the environmental impact of mining and other proposed developments.
This was the first time science public outreach team students gave the water presentation. Most of their talks are about outer space since the program grew out of the Green Bank Observatory and was funded by the NASA West Virginia Space Grant Consortium. Both space science and water science are ever present in this state, the space science because of the gigantic telescopes in Green Bank and the water science because of the abundance of water in the state, and because of the threat of pollution, like the 2014 chemical spill in Charleston.
RIFFE: Do you remember the water crisis a few years ago?
KIDS: Yes!
RIFFE: Chemicals that we use to clean off coal, they soaked into the water and nobody knew about it until it was too late. We’re trying to protect our water. So they already use water gauging to detect how much flow is coming from water. They put these sensors all around different rivers, so if they put sensors in different rivers to measure how much water is flowing, it makes sense that we could also put sensors in rivers to detect pollutants and then it tells the water company, "Hey, don't draw water from here. It's dangerous." That way we can stop events like the one that happened here in Charleston before they actually happen and before you guys get water that smells all funny in your houses.
MAZZELLA: At the end of their talk, Riffe and Offutt have the students make mountains sculpted from crushed newspapers with a plastic tablecloth over it, following the contours of ridges and valleys. The kids put cars, plastic animals like a penguin or Bugs Bunny throughout the scene. Then Riffe used motor oil and soil to mimic pollution and animal waste before pouring water on top and driving the pollution downhill to cover the people, houses and penguin in things they should not be covered in.
RIFFE: Now we’ve built our watershed. And we're going to see how pollutants can travel down to the bottom of it. So wherever there's a farm there's going to be a lot of animal waste.
KIDS: Eeww. Poo. That's poop.
RIFFE: And anywhere that we have a lot of cars, we might have a lot of pollutants from the cars. So we're going to show where some oil could be.
OFFUTT: Guys what if we lived down here and we drank the water that came downstream? [Booo.] What would be in the water that we drank?
KIDS: Poop. Chemicals. Dangerous, hazardous stuff.
MAZZELLA: We all know that kids are learning science in school from teachers. But learning from near peers like Riffe and Offutt adds another dimension. They’re in college, which comes after K-12, so they’re modeling a potential next step and showing their younger compatriots that they made the transition to college and into science so, if the kids want to, why can’t they?
RIFFE: I think there’s a real risk of getting stuck in being downtrodden in West Virginia. Because there is a lot of poor areas and there is a lot of rural areas where there’s not a great market for I don’t know. Even professionals. Like there’s, all of the jobs are blue-collar jobs. Which is incredibly important, but I think that you also need to give kids a way and like a ladder to get up if they want to become a professor or a scientist or even a teacher. They need to see a role model and they need to see this is where I can go to do that. And I kind of like that SPOT sends us out there. And it's like, “Hey I went to elementary school here and now I’m studying biology. And if you want to do that, you can too.”
MAZZELLA: This may sound tentative. Like, will you be good at a career path just because you know it exists? No. But interest starts with learning about your options. That’s what happened to Kathryn Williamson who has a PhD in physics, runs the planetarium at WVU and is the faculty adviser for the Public Science Outreach Team.
KATHRYN WILLIAMSON: I liked astronomy in eighth grade when I was taught it. And I was just talking about it at home, and my dad had Carl Sagan’s book "Cosmos" and so he gave it to me and I just really liked it. I didn’t know who Carl Sagan was before that. So, I guess I was just really lucky that my dad recognized that interest and decided to foster it a little bit. So that was really enough to keep me on the path. I never would’ve said when I was in eighth grade, “I want to be a science communicator or run a planetarium.” But, you know, it kept me chugging along and then when things got hard, it was like the little beacon of light that made it so that I didn’t give up or quit.
MAZZELLA: Williamson says it’s important to share current scientific research with students, especially science that applies to their lives.
WILLIAMSON: It’s just it might be cool to hear about some awesome research going on on the other side of the world. That’s not going to feel realistic. That's not going to feel obtainable. And so, we really try to keep it centered around that sense of place so that way it feels like something they can see themselves doing. That it’s obtainable. And it’s realistic. And you know, people that they know who aren’t that different from them. Or they don't seem like those crazy scientists in lab coats. They don’t seem like weirdos who are socially inept. A lot of kids can have that impression that scientists don’t have friends or they don't go outside and play. You know, they’re not normal somehow. And so, it’s just breaking down those barriers that, “Yeah, West Virginians do science. West Virginians like science. They like caring for their water.”
MAZZELLA: Offut grew up in a family of teachers, sees the value of education and wants to be prepared to teach her own students some day what they need to know for the careers of their choosing. But they have to know that exists first.
OFFUTT: Before I joined SPOT, I didn’t really think of West Virginia as a science state either. It’s just not something that a lot of people think about. But when you think about all of the opportunities that we have here for students and for professionals, I mean it really shows you that there are lots of different ways we can get involved in science. Even talking about what we talked about today with our water presentation, if you have a basic understanding of water and watersheds and the fact that we have a ton of it. I mean, that could open up so many jobs if we started distributing water to other places. It just takes people that understand that and are willing to move forward with it.
MAZZELLA: What we know about the world can change how we live even if it doesn’t change our careers. Water was a near obsession at my house in Florida. My dad worked for a local public utility and we would go to open houses to see the water treatment ponds, the control room, the lab where lab things happened. We got handouts of the hydrologic cycle to color. And one of my Dad’s coworkers dressed up as their conservation mascot Dolly Raindrop who looked like a drop of water. His real name was Bob.
All of this influenced how we lived. We did beach cleanups. We got persnickety about recycling and up tight about not littering. On vacation one year, my brother, who was 8, was moving rocks at the edge of a lake. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing. He was making himself a path to pick up a plastic car floor mat that found its way there.
So knowing the bigger picture means that we know to become engaged with the issues in our communities. That’s the very least that Offutt and Riffe want to come out of their sessions.
So how did they do? Here’s 10-year-old Kaidyn Elkins.
KAIDYN ELKINS: Well water I thought was just always clean. I thought it would never get dirty and that whenever you put stuff in the water, it’s just always clean. Until today I learned that whenever you can actually put stuff in the water, it actually makes it really messy.
MAZZELLA: Emma Berger, who is 9, had this to say.
EMMA BERGER: I learned that one of the reasons that we can’t have some of the water is because there’s metal in it. I think that it’s sad that people want to put metal in the waters. It makes me want to like get people to stop doing it.
MAZZELLA: Were you interested in water before today?
BERGER: I didn’t know much about water. I just knew that we used it for stuff.
MAZZELLA: Mallory Beane, 9, has a particular vocation for activism in the community someday with groups such as Save Our Streams and West Virginia Trout Unlimited, and closer to home with a brother who may rue the day she ever witnessed this presentation.
MALLORY BEANE: Well, I’m really thinking about when I get older, joining that group, one of the groups that she shared up there because I really want to help take care of the water and because people throw a lot of trash and stuff in there so that’s what I want to help with. I learned a lot and I’m planning to teach other people that don’t know about it so that’s what I’m going to teach, especially my brother. Well I’m going to teach him not to use so much water because he takes very long showers, and I’m always yelling at him to get out because he usually takes so long showers and he washes his hands so long and that just wastes water.
MAZZELLA: Williamson knows that not all of these kids are going to be scientists, nor should they. But she does see power in familiarity with scientific concepts.
WILLIAMSON: When you’re learning, sometimes you do just need to start with, you’ve heard of something before. You’ve heard of a concept. Or you have that "wow" moment or an "aha" moment of some sort. And that can be a seed that can grow and give you a little bit of confidence the next time you hear that concept. Or maybe it inspires you to take action and clean water when you didn’t realize it needed to be clean. So, that’s what we try to instill in the students. We don’t fool ourselves that we’re going to teach them huge concepts over the course of an hour. But we’re trying to plant that seed that they feel like they’ve heard of it before. They feel like it's a little bit familiar.
The path from little kid shrieking over motor oil splashing on Bugs Bunny to scientist taking water samples is a very possible journey. Offutt thinks kids already have one of the most important things in common with scientists.
OFFUTT: And I do one presentation where we talk about the sun and they’re always afraid that we’re going to go into the sun and burn up. Every single time I give that presentation, I get a question about like, “What if the sun gets too close to us?” And it’s cool because those are things that all kids think about. Those silly questions, they’re not dumb questions. They have a meaning, you know. And to take the time to answer them, I think means a lot to the kids because you’re saying, like, this is what scientists ask, too. Scientists ask questions like this and find the answers.
How much of our water do you think is available for us to use? Does anyone think it’s less than one percent? It's less than one percent. [Ooh] A few of you got that right. And we're going to do an activity to show you guys how much of that water we can actually use and why.
RIFFE: All of this is all the water on the planet. What would be wrong with our freshwater if we couldn't use it? We can only use one drop of it. Can you even see it from where you guys are? [No] So we do have a lot of water on the planet but we can't actually use a lot of it so it’s really important that we actually take care of the water that we have to use.
MAZZELLA: Thank you for listening to Sparked, a podcast of West Virginia University Magazine. This episode was recorded and produced by Raymond Thompson Jr. and me, Diana Mazzella. Do you like stories about changes in K-12 education? Then stay tuned for an episode later this season about how one school district improved its math scores, by a lot. Drop us a line to tell us what you thought of this episode. And you can listen to all of last season on our website at wvumag.wvu.edu/sparked or wherever you get your podcasts. Sparked is a production of West Virginia University, located in Morgantown, West Virginia.
