Driving Question
How is clean and accessible drinking water in Philadelphia a civic responsibility?
Big Ideas
Philadelphia was the first successful model of a large urban public water system in the United States.
Access to fresh, clean, safe water is a human right and a collective responsibility.
We each play a significant role in ensuring our public water supply is clean, safe and accessible for all.
Summary
Students will learn about the motivations related to public health that led Philadelphia to design a new drinking water system to provide fresh, clean water to people.
Engage
The Guided Imagery Script provides a way to help transport students back to the late 18th century when Philadelphia was motivated to create its first public drinking water system. Prior to reading the story aloud, provide one of the graphic organizers linked below, or create your own. After listening to the story, have students use the graphic organizer to capture their reflections and descriptive words that stood out to them.
A sample (pdf) graphic organizer (table format) is linked HERE.
A thought cloud (pdf) organizer (speech bubbles) is linked HERE.
The Slide deck will provide reflection questions using their graphic organizer followed by THINK-PAIR-SHARE and class discussion
Explore and Explain
What led Philadelphia to develop a safe and reliable public water system?
Incorporating the reading of Fever: 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson into this Learning Experience will provide excellent historical context to help answer the question about what motivated Philadelphians to engineer a new drinking water system.
EXPLORE PRIMARY SOURCE ACTIVITY
Hand out Explore Primary Sources document resources provided in the MATERIALS tab for jigsaw activity.
Use these links below as resources for the TIMELINE Activity
Philadelphia Water History Time Line
“Fever 1793: Philadelphia Great Experiment” about Yellow Fever epidemic and the beginning of the Water Supply System with accompanying Teacher and Student guides
FWWIC History (VIMEO) (This film will be used again in 2.3 to examine the engineering ingenuity. When viewing this time, encourage your student to focus on why the Water Works became necessary.)
If you want to go even deeper, explore The Water and Drainage History of Philadelphia: A 7-Part Course
Elaborate
For fun, ask students to travel through time and write a first person narrative as if they lived during the time the public water system came to be.
The Learning Experience will end with a reflective writing piece to address the guiding questions.
Extension
CIVIC ENGAGEMENT
Develop a water appreciation plan and/or a celebration plan for home and/or school/community.
Research various methods of civic engagement and discussion focusing on historical examples or modern methods.
Survey classmate opinions on types of civic engagement and create graphs or pie charts to display results.
Research historical tax rates and living costs and compare them to today. Use graphs or charts to display the data.
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Visit or explore online a local American Art Collection (Philadelphia Museum of Art or Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts) from this time period (early 1800’s). Compare and contrast the works of art. Discuss and learn about style, color, form, and presentation.
A sociological connection from the painting to historical newspaper documents about celebrations of the time, public gatherings, or public news could also link students to the world of the painting and help them understand different kinds of historical documents.
SOCIAL STUDIES/HISTORY
Plan a Field trip to Old City and/or the historic section of Philadelphia and explore the neighborhoods from a “historical water” perspective.
SCIENCE
Discuss waterborne diseases. Assign each student one of five waterborne diseases (cholera, giardiasis, shigellosis, amebiasis, and cryptosporidiosis). Students research the assigned disease and create a brief report including transmission, symptoms, prevention, treatment and when the disease was discovered. See Waterborne Disease Chart.
COMPARING CITIES
Find contemporary (1800) water supply/public health challenges in comparable cities like Philadelphia and New York, Chicago or Boston (Carl Smith discusses at length) and compare. This comparison could “flow” nicely into an engineering lesson on 3 different engineering solutions related to the source of water (river, aqueduct, lake).
Teacher Support
Essential Question:
How is clean and accessible drinking water in Philadelphia a civic responsibility?
Guiding Questions:
What does it take for us to drink a glass of fresh, clean, delicious water?
Engage:
What do you think led people in Philadelphia more that 200 years ago to the decision to look for a new source of drinking water?
Explore and Explain:
What led people in Philadelphia to create a public water supply system (instead of private)?
What is civic responsibility? How did ideas about civic responsibility play a role in Philadelphia’s first public water supply system?
Elaborate:
Why was there so much public celebrating in Philadelphia related to clean water?
Students will be able to:
- reflect and describe what it must have been like to live in a past time period in Philadelphia before it had a public water system
- use primary source text and imagery to explain why Philadelphia was motivated to develop a public water system and, once completed, why there was so much celebrating
Civic (adjective) : Of or relating to a citizen, a city, citizenship or community affairs.
Waterworks (noun) : an establishment for managing a water supply.
Have students write a reflection about the driving question followed by their opinion about whether they believe that a city should take complete responsibility of providing drinking water to everyone who lives there or is there another point of view?.
Standards
PA STEEL Standard 3.4.6-8.D
Gather, read and synthesize information from multiple sources to investigate how Pennsylvania environmental issues affect Pennsylvania’s human and natural systems.