Abstract
It is vital that the next generation of public health practitioners understand the importance of ensuring affordable and equitable access to safe drinking water for all communities, and the interconnected roles that scientific research, public policy, community engagement, and advocacy play in ensuring this. Here, we describe the Water Tool, a website where student-users develop an exploratory and customizable journey through data on drinking water suppliers’ compliance with regulations, watershed pollution, and environmental justice: https://eew-sdwa-nj.streamlit.app/ In the course we built alongside a New Jersey-specific version of the Water Tool, students complete three in-class assignments and a final project. They first use it to answer a basic set of questions such as, how many public water systems are there in the state? Students then find their own water provider through an interactive map and describe the provider’s source water and number of persons served. Next, they use the tool to investigate socioeconomic, biophysical, and public health indicators of environmental inequity in their area. In the final project, students reflect on the meaning of the information they compiled and how to communicate it. Through hands-on engagement with data and structured opportunities for reflection, the Water Tool enables students to learn both about how drinking water is regulated and how to assess information on drinking water quality for specific water systems. Although we designed the tool and assignments specifically with New Jersey in mind, it could be reconfigured for use in other states or more local contexts.
Introduction
Access to safe and affordable drinking water is a critical environmental, public health, and public policy issue. Drinking water crises (e.g., Flint, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi) have heightened concerns about aging infrastructure, long-term underinvestment in drinking water systems (American Water Works Association, 2012), and their intersection with environmental justice (Hanna-Attisha et al., 2016; Safarpour & Spearing, 2024). Research suggests that approximately 10% of community water systems in the United States were in violation of drinking water standards at least once over a recent 3-year period (Scanlon et al., 2023). Further, research has demonstrated differences in exposure to drinking water contaminants by race/ethnicity, income, and rurality, among other factors. For instance, counties with more substantial Hispanic/Latino and American Indian/Alaskan Native populations tend to have more arsenic and uranium in their water supply (Martinez-Morata et al., 2022), and community water systems serving higher percentages of Black and Latino residents are more likely to find PFAS in drinking water samples (Liddie et al., 2023).
It is vital that the next generation of public health practitioners understand the importance of ensuring affordable and equitable access to safe drinking water for all communities, and the interconnected roles that scientific research, public policy, community engagement, and advocacy play in ensuring this. Although students might recognize environmental inequality and injustice from experience, they may not have the conceptual tools to analyze it (Moore et al., 2019). Interactive and locally-engaged training can give them those tools and provide a meaningful way for them to develop data analysis skills they may later employ in future career paths (Briggs, 2024). Instructors can both familiarize students with key data sources and teach them to think critically about data, all while promoting civic engagement (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020; Williams et al., 2014).
Taking up this challenge, we developed a new interdisciplinary course alongside a web-based tool for visually exploring publicly available data on many aspects of water safety. The Water Tool is an interactive website where student-users develop an exploratory and customizable journey through drinking water data: https://eew-sdwa-nj.streamlit.app/. Here we report on the Water Tool’s conceptualization and function, its role in the course, and our assessment of the tool for helping undergraduate students work with data in geographic and social contexts.
Course Description
We designed the Water Tool in a collaboration between the William Paterson University of New Jersey (WPUNJ) and the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) from 2021 to 2023. The Water Tool is an integral component of “Water and Justice: the Past, Present and Future of Water in New Jersey,” a junior-level course cross-listed among the Departments of Environmental Science, Public Health, and Community Development and Social Justice at WPUNJ. The course was developed to meet the University’s Core Curriculum - Community and Civic Engagement requirement, which is focused on helping students understand the importance of civic engagement and to develop skills in this area (see Table 1).
Course objectives and student learning outcomes for Water and Justice, as aligned with Area 5 of WPUNJ’s University Core Curriculum (UCC) - “Community and Civic Engagement.”
The overall aim of the course is to educate students about the centrality of water to human wellbeing in the context of WPUNJ’s local geography. The disciplinary backgrounds of the participating faculty—environmental science, climate science, anthropology, and public health—are woven into the course. Environmental science topics covered in the course include past variability and extremes in water resources, future vulnerabilities related to climate change, and research methods for studying hydroclimate variability. Anthropological aspects of the course include Indigenous knowledge and theory related to water access, conservation and preservation, and social science methods for understanding community perspectives on drinking water access and quality. Public health aspects of the course include historical perspectives on water and health, past epidemics linked to sanitation, and how providing clean water has been a focus and challenge of human societies for hundreds of years. Contemporary issues include public health disasters such as the Toms River, NJ childhood cancer cluster and the US’s aging drinking water infrastructure. Public health policy discussions include the regulation of contaminants and state and federal responsibilities under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), the future of water in the context of climate change in NJ, and the importance of integrating sustainability and equity principles into planning. The course also addresses the social determinants of health (Mercado et al., 2024), such as education levels, housing access, and income.
The course uses intersectional (The Combahee River Collective, 1977) and environmental justice frameworks (Mascarenhas, 2020) to examine water pollution, public health impacts related to unsafe drinking water, lead in drinking water, and water insecurity. Broadly, environmental justice considers how the benefits made possible by nature (e.g., clean water) and the harms spread through it (e.g., toxic contaminants) are inequitably distributed across social groups, who in turn lack the power to shape the decisions that drive these inequities and whose rights are rarely recognized. Intersectionality considers how this marginalization results from various systems of oppression (e.g., racism and sexism) that function together. These concepts were introduced through readings, videos and class discussions, including specific cases such as lead in drinking water in Flint, MI and Newark, NJ, and access to clean drinking water for Native American communities.
The course includes three field trips to allow students to connect classroom learning to the community and to learn about career opportunities within the water workforce. Field trips include a guided visit to a local water treatment plant and a trip to Paterson Falls on the Passaic River to learn about Indigenous engagements and industrial uses of the river and water pollution. Students also interacted with various water professionals and a local community activist working on combined sewage overflows.
Best Practices for Engaging Students in Learning About Environmental Justice Through Data
While field trips were central to the civic engagement goal of the course, so too was learning about how to find, use, and interpret information on drinking water quality for specific water systems in New Jersey. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) provides online data on drinking water quality, but its user interface is outdated and its data displays are limited. At the federal level, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses its Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) platform (echo.epa.gov) to share a wide variety of data on how public agencies enforce environmental protection laws, as well as records of industry self-reported releases of pollutants. However, ECHO data are neither complete nor well-contextualized (Allaire et al., 2018; Benami et al., 2021; Giles, 2020). The data presented on the ECHO platform are also generally not well-summarized in terms of meaningful geographic units (e.g., by ZIP code, watershed, or county). Even when the data are summarized geographically, such as in the EPA/State Drinking Water Dashboard, social and demographic indicators that could help identify environmental injustices are missing. This limits students’ access to datasets that could help them understand and engage with environmental problems and inequities. We developed the Water Tool to respond to these challenges, integrating theory, pedagogy, and technology.
Pedagogical scholarship in public health suggests students’ capacities for data evaluation and use can be fostered by curating complex datasets around their interests and developing tailored metadata (e.g., codebooks; Briggs, 2024). The critical data literacy scholarship also recommends promoting broader reflections on where data comes from Gray et al. (2018). Many of the principles from D’Ignazio and Klein’s (2020) Data Feminism are relevant to this, including “consider[ing] context,” which refers to the fact that “data are not neutral, or objective” but instead reflect specific interests that need to be accounted for in “ethical analysis.”
EDGI’s theoretical perspectives on data are informed by these ideas, which come together in the concept of environmental data justice (EDJ; Dillon et al., 2017; Vera et al., 2019). Environmental data justice takes as a core premise that while data are often deployed in harmful ways (e.g., to justify continued pollution), they are nonetheless a factor in how government institutions make decisions, making it important to learn how to use them in less harmful ways. In practice, this involves “situating” data in terms of how it was produced and which viewpoints it does and does not express (Dillon et al., 2019). For instance, public datasets like ECHO are compilations of self-reported records from both industry and state agencies, rather than records reflecting community perspectives or the public interest. A practical response would be to visualize, analyze, and interpret data in its broader, place-based context. Over the past 6 years, EDGI has built an infrastructure to host copies of EPA’s datasets that can be more easily accessed and situated, such as in the Water Tool.
Pedagogical goals for the Water Tool include helping students develop knowledge concerning drinking water regulatory issues; introducing the concept of environmental justice to students; providing user-friendly access to statewide and water system level drinking water data (e.g., number of health-based violations); and examining public information that is relevant to drinking water quality, such as lead pipe estimates and watershed pollution levels. We also aim to engage students in exploring specific areas of interest (e.g., the water system where they live). Informed by Shneiderman’s (1996) “mantra” about drawing information and insights from data—“overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand”—we provide students both statewide and targeted, local information.
Using the Water Tool
In what follows, we describe the tool and students’ interaction with it. We highlight elements of “situating” data, wherein we prompt students to think critically about where data come from and what they can and cannot show. While the tool maps an abundance of localized and statewide data on drinking water issues, it also questions the provenance, completeness, and authoritativeness of its sources.
The welcome page introduces the tool and uses a series of questions to outline the structure of the rest of the site (Figure 1). Buttons at the bottom of each page guide students on a linear journey through the site, though this is only strictly required for the first few pages. A panel on the left-hand side of the screen shows users the other pages they can explore.
The “Welcome” page for the Water Tool.
The statewide overview page features two interactive maps. The first uses NJDEP data to show the boundaries of over 500 public water systems (PWS). Some PWS, including institutions such as hospitals or prisons, do not distribute water widely. The second map shows these systems, with some of them being incorrectly located outside of New Jersey. Rather than remove such errors, we used them as an opportunity to discuss the fallibility of authoritative datasets; a set of prompts next to the map guides students into the kinds of reflexive questions they can ask about the data: “why are there PWS shown outside of New Jersey? What are some implications of a data error like this?”
In “Find Public Water Systems,” students take what they learned from the statewide overview and then seek out more specific information about water providers in an area of interest, such as their hometown. They do this by panning and zooming across the map, which automatically loads basic information about PWS in the frame of the map at that zoom level (Figure 2). They can retrieve details about each PWS by clicking on its marker on the map.
The “Search for Public Water Systems” page, which interactively loads water system locations as users navigate the map.
From here, students can progress to one, or more, of four pages that provide specific lenses on drinking water issues in the selected area of interest. They can explore violations of the SDWA that the PWS in the area may have on their record, including whether these are “health-based violations.” Health-based violations indicate that a PWS served potentially harmful water, whether due to high concentrations of a contaminant or disinfectant or failing to follow treatment standards. The EPA uses this reporting category to differentiate infractions that involve direct threats to public health from violations related to reporting and monitoring (Scanlon et al., 2023). We ask students to think more deeply about this difference—it’s easy to believe violations marked as “health-based” are the ones that really matter, but we prompt students to consider how administrative violations such as a failure to report mean that unreported health-based violations might exist—and be unknown to both the public and governing entities.
Another question we hoped students would have after examining the information on SDWA violations in their selected area is, “who might be impacted by SDWA violations that threaten public health?” To that end, the “Environmental Justice” page draws from archived versions of EPA’s now-defunct EJScreen, which calculated percentile ranks for each Census block group across New Jersey for both demographic and environmental factors. Indicators include the percentage of people of color in the water system catchment area, the percentage of population classified as low income, Superfund site proximity, and air quality in the area. Although these are not all directly related to drinking water, they provide a sense of the cumulative burdens some communities face; communities that have high air pollution scores or low high school graduation rates might not only be more likely to see health-based drinking water violations but also have fewer economic resources to address them and fewer political resources to prevent them.
Lead is a significant drinking water-related environmental justice issue, rising to national public awareness following the Flint water crisis (Hanna-Attisha et al., 2016). Jersey Water Works, an association of drinking water stakeholders, including municipal water providers, publishes estimates of the number of lead service lines connecting homes with their infrastructure. A lead service line (LSL) is a lead pipeline that goes from the water main in the street to a residence. LSL data are not complete and the data values themselves—the number of LSLs per service area—are not intuitive, so we try to situate them for students. We explain that they do not help us understand who exactly is impacted or how likely a given tap in that water system is to have some lead in the water.
Finally, the “Watershed Pollution” page uses discharge monitoring reports from industrial facilities and municipal sewage treatment plants to provide a sense of what threats to drinking water quality might exist throughout the watershed. Drinking water sources can be affected by the legally permitted release of pollutants in an area (e.g., Poirier et al., 2024 on potential PFAS exposures amongst incarcerated people), so this information provides important context. However, once again the data are limited and we prompt students to reflect: where do these data come from? (polluters themselves) What about other sources of pollution? (e.g., unregulated entities such as those that discharge at levels not requiring a permit, facilities that fail to provide discharge monitoring reports, or deposition from air emissions).
Teaching with the Water Tool
Students learn how to use the Water Tool through three in-class assignments and a final project. These assignments are spaced throughout the semester and aligned with the weekly topical focus. The first assignment familiarizes students with the statewide overview section of the tool and the specialized terminology used in EPA’s drinking water dataset, such as “health-based violation.” Students navigate through the statewide overview module and answer a basic set of questions such as: what is a PWS, how many PWSs does New Jersey have, and what is the predominant water system size and source in New Jersey? This is an in-class activity, with faculty helping to address technical issues that arise with the tool. In-class review of the assignment also provides an opportunity to reinforce and clarify key concepts.
The second assignment asks students to use the map-based selection page to find their own water provider, usually the one in their hometown or community. They answer questions about that provider’s source water, number of persons served, and the type of water system (community, non-community, etc.) Students are introduced to the concepts of Maximum Contaminant Levels and public health goals, and they compare these for contaminants of their choice. They identify drinking water contaminants within each category that EPA regulates (organic chemicals, inorganic chemicals, microorganisms, and radionuclides) and investigate their potential health effects. Students have an opportunity to share what they learn with the class.
The third assignment focuses on the students’ own water system in social and environmental context through investigation of the tool’s environmental justice page. Students are asked to choose five environmental justice indicators (both socioeconomic and environmental) and report on them. They are also asked to determine the number of LSLs reported in their water system and to use the watershed pollution page to examine five contaminants and the facilities these contaminants are coming from. Students reflect on how socioeconomic and environmental factors might relate to health burdens in the community by referencing the data they compiled, applying concepts environmental justice concepts like “overburdened communities” and “privilege,” and discussing in writing what they think might be the significance of living with multiple sources of environmental contamination, such as road traffic, lead service lines, and Superfund sites, or living with lower concentrations or fewer sources of contaminants.
For the culminating project—a research paper and class presentation—students draw on work already completed in the three previous assignments but extend this with more research and critical reflection on the data and course themes. The paper is divided into data and reflection sections. For the data section, students review the information they collected using the Water Tool throughout the semester while also consulting National Cancer Institute, CDC, and EPA websites to learn about the drinking water contaminants they selected and their human health effects. They must also visit the website of their water system and note announcements or interesting features and conduct a web search for recent news stories about the water system. For the reflection section of the paper, students discuss what they found interesting, important, or relevant in their data and what message they would want to share with the broader public about their water system. Finally, students present their compiled data and reflections to the class. For example, one student analyzed data for the Jersey City Municipal Utilities Authority water system serving Hudson County. In class, the student presented on the number of LSLs identified in the water system and the plans for replacing these. They examined watershed contaminants such as nitrates, dioxins, mercury, and PCBs and identified their human health effects. The EJ indicators the student examined included the percentage of homes with lead paint, and proximity to Superfund sites.
Overall, the assignment provides students the opportunity to see that overburdened communities are inequitably affected by multiple environmental hazards and that approaches to solving environmental problems that account for these inequities are needed. Students’ reflections identified some issues with water systems (such as health-based violations), but also expressed increased trust in water providers. Several highlighted the important role of government in ensuring equal access to clean water, while others noted their increased understanding of different types of water systems, contaminant sources, and their impact on public health and ecosystems. In future iterations of the course, or its equivalents elsewhere, students could be prompted to more directly reflect on how it changed their perspectives on drinking water (if at all) and their ideas for addressing water justice.
Our Reflections
The Water Tool enables students to learn both about how drinking water is regulated and how to access and evaluate information on drinking water quality for specific water systems. It does so through hands-on engagement with data and structured opportunities for reflection. To be sure, students faced technical issues using the tool, including familiarizing themselves with its features and slow loading times. One strength of the Water Tool is the “situated” nature of the data, which allows for developing a holistic understanding of drinking water within a specific social and environmental context, reinforcing the interdisciplinary perspective of the course. Likewise, one limitation may be its adaptability to other regions. Although the SDWA is in force across the US, we designed the website specifically with New Jersey in mind. We acquired and processed New Jersey-specific data on public water system boundaries, lead service lines, and state-specific percentile rankings on environmental justice indicators. Some of the prompts and guidelines developed for the assignments derive from local context, such as New Jersey’s lead service line replacement law and its definition of “overburdened communities.”
However, much of the tool and assignments could be reconfigured to be used in other states or even more local contexts. Most of the underlying data for the tool is publicly available for the rest of the US in spreadsheet form, and instructors can access and share it with their students (we are glad to help with this; see also Briggs’s, 2024 preparation of data files from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey). In this way, students can engage with the very same data, but for New York, Arizona, or elsewhere, without the New Jersey-specific website. While this introduces a few new considerations about how students may or may not be able to use a software program like Excel to process data and produce charts and maps, the same prompts we provided in the tool, investigative assignments, and reflections still apply. The general sorts of questions we have asked students and ways we have guided them through evidence gathering and synthesis related to the intersection of environmental justice and public health are widely applicable. The tool and assignments are valuable illustrations of how to prompt students to situate public health and environmental data infrastructures while also using them to learn more about environmental justice.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [grant numbers 2127334, 2127335].
IRB Approval
None. This portion of the project did not involve research with human subjects.
