Understanding the Hoosick Falls Water Crisis

Bennington College, Bennington VT

Investigators

Abstract

The Village of Hoosick Falls in New York recently discovered unsafe concentrations of Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA) in its public water system. Faculty members at Bennington College will offer a new course, "Hoosick Falls Water Crisis," to provide undergraduate students with key analytic skills and field research experience in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields related to this real-time disaster. The course will be co-taught by a social scientist, a chemist, and a geoscientist and will draw on methodologies and concepts within anthropology, chemistry, and geology to equip undergraduates to conduct urgent environmental research in times of crisis. This project will also produce a dataset for the community of Hoosick Falls, NY. Three wide-ranging broader impacts are anticipated. First, the students and researchers will collect independent data on PFOA concentrations in residential wells, resulting in a dataset that will help characterize the origin, extent, and trajectory of PFOA. Second, students will assist faculty members in preparing presentations of the findings to the community, which will not only serve to inform the public, but will also help strengthen students' communication skills and help them better connect their scientific knowledge to societal outcomes. Finally, the faculty researchers plan to develop and distribute teaching and learning materials on PFOA for inclusion in postsecondary STEM curricula. Understanding the Hoosick Falls Water Crisis seeks to effect engaged student learning around the Hoosick Falls water crisis in order to provide students with robust training and experience in monitoring groundwater contamination and generate preliminary independent data that will help characterize the origin, extent, and trajectory of the PFOA groundwater plume around Hoosick Falls, NY. The guiding educational research question is: How can environmental research on a local public crisis enhance the STEM curriculum for undergraduate students? Specifically, the researchers are studying how training students in environmental chemistry and hydrogeology and equipping them to apply those discipline-based skills to help produce key data on a local crisis will influence student enrollment and retention in STEM fields. The researchers hypothesize that hands-on experience in meaningful environmental research will demonstrate the value of STEM fields in a liberal arts education and enhance student outcomes within STEM for both STEM and non-STEM majors. Evaluation will occur using (1) pre- and post-assessments that will measure student attitudes towards and aptitude in environmental chemistry and hydrology, (2) enrollment and course performance data, and (3) student reflections.