A VISUAL, ANALOGY-BASED TEXTBOOK TO SUPPORT UNDERGRADUATE GROUNDWATER EDUCATION

Awareness of groundwater as a critical, yet fragile, resource is increasing, and is leading to rapidly growing interest in hydrogeology education, particularly at the undergraduate level. However, the hidden nature of groundwater makes it a challenging topic to teach, because students cannot directly see it. They must instead develop the ability to visualize groundwater movement through the subsurface, based on limited spatial and temporal information. At the undergraduate level, many students who are interested in taking a hydrogeology course have not yet had the foundational math, physics, and chemistry courses necessary to understand the traditional hydrogeology curriculum as it is often taught at the graduate level. A further obstacle is the dense, highly technical nature of available hydrogeology textbooks, which many undergraduate students simply are too intimidated by to even read. Therefore, there is a growing need for educational resources that support the development of undergraduate-level introductory hydrogeology courses.

We present several examples from our new, highly visual undergraduate-level textbook, “The Basics of Groundwater,” which introduces foundational concepts in hydrogeology using analogies, thought experiments, real-world problems, and numerous original illustrations. We developed this book in parallel with undergraduate-level hydrogeology courses at three different institutions, incorporating student feedback and linking each chapter to in-class exercises, quizzes, and hands-on lab activities. The premise of our approach is that many complex hydrogeological concepts can be made accessible to students with non-technical backgrounds, by gradually building understanding through interactive thinking exercises and visualizations. We also present examples from the book of how equations and quantitative problem solving exercises can be introduced in a way that ties into what students have already learned, such that students become more comfortable with quantitative reasoning, rather than being intimidated by it. Our hope is that “The Basics of Groundwater” and our teaching approach can serve as a resource for other instructors developing undergraduate-level hydrogeology curricula.