INTEGRATING FIELD-BASED SERVICE-LEARNING INTO AN INTRODUCTORY HYDROLOGY COURSE

Students in introductory hydrology courses are typically required to engage in a number of field-based laboratory exercises.  Often, these exercises merely help students understand the process of data collection, gain proficiency with field equipment, and ask for rudimentary interpretations of the data.  The establishment of a service-learning component to any geology course provides students with a greater understanding of the “need” for data collection and contributes to their engagement in the exercise by giving them an answer to question so often asked: “What am I ever going to use this for?” 

During the spring 2004 semester, students at Green Mountain College enrolled in an Introductory Hydrology course collaborated with fellow students in an Introductory Chemistry class on a service-learning project.  The students were responsible for establishing a long-term monitoring project along Poultney River in east-central Vermont working with the Poultney Mettowee Watershed Partnership (PMWP), a local non-profit conservation group.  In collaboration with the PMWP, four sites were established for long-term monitoring.  Students in the hydrology course were required to: (1) survey the cross-sectional morphology of the stream channel using a Topcon GTS-212 total station, (2) collect pebble counts above and below the cross-section, (3) collect GPS coordinates for the monitoring sites and backsight monuments used for surveying using a Trimble GeoXT and Pathfinder Office, (4) collect discharge measurements along the cross-section, (5) provide a detailed sketch of the river and surveyed area, and (6) provide graphs of cross-sectional morphology and pebble counts for each site using Microsoft Excel.  Students in the chemistry course were responsible for collecting: (1) conductivity, (2) pH, (3) temperature, (3) hardness, (4) alkalinity, and water samples sent to the DEC State lab for total phosphorus, total nitrogen, E. Coli, chlorophyll a. 

In addition to achieving the traditional goals of familiarizing students with typical field equipment, feedback from the students was highly positive and genuinely interested in the results because they felt they had actually “contributed to society”, rather than just completing the lab for a grade.