Driving Question
How is clean and accessible drinking water in Philadelphia a civic responsibility?
Big Ideas
Philadelphia created the first successful public water system in the United States, committed to engineering a water system as a civic responsibility for public health.
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
Take 4 minutes to pair up with a student near you and share some of the highlights of your writing with each other.
Try to identify some similarities and differences between the sensory information that you used in your writing.
Slide 7: Use this collection of primary source accounts of the Yellow Fever epidemic in Philadelphia. The Yellow Fever epidemic spread as a direct impact of the lack of clean water in parts of the city and led to the creation of the Fairmount Water Works and an innovative system to provide clean water to residents in the city.
After they have completed the close reading of the primary source documents, have students view THIS VIDEO.
Do a brief summary of the events and issues they have read, listened to, and watched. This will form the foundational information as we continue on this exploration.
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.
Extension
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 motivated Philadelphia to develop a new water system?
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?
What led people in Philadelphia to create a public water supply system (instead of private)?
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?.
PA STEELS Standard
Environmental Literacy Skills
3.4.6-8.D Investigating Environmental Issues: Gather, read and synthesize information from multiple sources to investigate how Pennsylvania environmental issues affect Pennsylvania’s human and natural systems.