“Give Said the Little Stream:” ¹

An urban stream cleanup’s impact on scholarly advancement and community enhancement

By Helen Ruth Aspaas

Introduction

            Institutional demands for high productivity by faculty members often require creative responses, especially for instructors seeking tenure and/or promotion. A stream cleanup effort that began as a service-learning project for a geography course at a public urban university has expanded into a variety of opportunities and expressions for scholarship, grantsmanship, instructional creativity and service to the community and university. Student civic engagement collaborating with the community has helped to build environmental awareness as expressed in protection of an urban watershed. This paper traces the ripple effects that derived from diversified efforts associated with the Reedy Creek service-learning project.

            Service-learning is best defined as a pedagogical strategy that enhances student learning of core course concepts by completing work in community projects. The projects are selected so that they correlate with course content and provide students opportunities to actively engage in worthwhile commitment to the betterment of the community. Best practices require a minimum of twenty hours of work on a selected project and three critical reflections in which students carefully synthesize course content with the service project. 

     ¹”Give Said the Little Stream” is a Sunday School Hymn popular in the late 19^th and throughout the 20^th Centuries. The words were written by Fanny J. Crosby (1820-1915), and the music composed by William J. Bradbury (1816-1868).

The Geography of Reedy Creek

            Reedy Creek is truly an urban watershed. Its 3.68 mile-long channel lies completely within the city limits of Richmond, Virginia, and the watershed is estimated to cover 2,700 square acres (Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Environmental Quality 2005). The creek drains into the James River near the city’s Class 5 rapids. The James River in turn drains into the Chesapeake Bay, thus making Reedy Creek a secondary level tributary of the Bay.

            The headwaters of Reedy Creek rest in artificially created wetlands built over the site of former low rent apartment units in an area once bedeviled by high crime rates and poverty (Sinclair et al. 2001). Following the creation of the artificial wetlands, the area was opened to single family home development, and it now houses a working-class community in newly constructed homes. The newest elementary school in the Richmond Public School System, Miles J. Jones Elementary School, lies a few short blocks from the wetlands, and the school’s enrollment includes students who reside in the Reedy Creek watershed.

            In its middle segment, Reedy Creek snakes through a low to middle income residential area that is bordered on the south by a business corridor and a major city thoroughfare. Estimates show over four square miles of impervious surfaces that are associated with businesses and parking lots in this area (Sinclair et al. 2001). In its mid-section Reedy Creek has been forced into a concrete channel. This engineering project was an effort to quickly remove storm water from the surrounding residential area as quickly as possible, but the project proved inadequate (Anon. 1998). Surrounding much of this channelized section of Reedy Creek is nineteen acres of natural woodlands.  The Reedy Creek Coalition, a citizens’ grass roots organization comprised of watershed residents, serves as a watchdog group to prevent development in this natural woodland.

            Through its lower reaches, Reedy Creek drains two contiguous public parks and a residential community of middle to upper incomes and mixed ethnicities. A public high school, a middle school, three elementary schools (including the aforementioned elementary school), and several private schools lie within the watershed boundaries.

            Unfortunately, Reedy Creek is polluted. Trash is a ubiquitous problem, and windblown trash accumulates in the channel. Severe storms wash trash and pollutants from impervious surfaces into the water, and illegal dumping occurs. Overuse of pesticides and fertilizers throughout the watershed wash additional chemicals into the stream, and  E. coli has been identified in specific sections of the stream (Shanabruch 2005).                

History of the Reedy Creek Service-Learning Project

            This section tracks the history of the Reedy Creek cleanup project as a service-learning option in an upper division geography course organized by world regions, offered at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). A growing body of literature addresses the pedagogy of service-learning in geography courses (Dorsey 2001, Crump 2002, Eflin and Sheaffer 2006, Parece and Aspaas 2007). All of these discussions relate the key themes of the discipline, i.e. space, human-environment interaction, and field experiences to service-learning projects. The Reedy Creek service-learning project further helps to reinforce geography principles as students observe the detrimental effects of human pollution on the environment in a local context and then compare the situation to environmental degradation occurring in the world regions discussed in the course: North America, Central and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and the nations that once comprised the former USSR.

            The Reedy Creek cleanup is presented as one service-learning option among several for students enrolled in the geography course. The environmental theme ties closely with class discussions and lectures that address environmental issues in the regions listed above. By working in an urban watershed that is highly polluted, students begin to understand the complexities of how watersheds become highly contaminated and the challenges faced in trying to restore them to natural conditions, especially when they flow through densely populated residential and commercial areas.

Another reason for including the cleanup as a service-learning option is the appeal of vigorous work in an outdoor setting for students who have keen interest in protecting the environment. The stream is reasonably close to the university, making the project accessible. Several students join the project because they have kayaked in the stream when it is at flood stage or have lived in some of the apartments in the neighborhood. Student time limitations are another factor that influences selection of the project. With daily class and work schedules, students find that weekend afternoon cleanups fit well with their complex schedules.

            The stream cleanup has evolved since its inception in 2001. At first, students focused on the lower reaches of the stream, near its mouth at the James River. The work was reasonably easy as students collected trash in the public parks. Access to the channel was fairly good, and cooperation from an official with the James River Park System facilitated the disposal of the trash and recyclables. During the first five years of the cleanups, severe storm incidents during the fall months washed huge amounts of trash into the lower reaches. Students then realized the need to move further upstream in order to tackle the trash problem closer to its root causes. In subsequent years, students went into the more rugged parts of the stream channel to collect trash, including large items like bicycles, automobile parts and grocery carts that had been imbedded in the stream bed or stream banks for years.

            By 2006, the students consistently discussed the issue of continued trash accumulation in their written reflections, often mentioning how important community participation and education would be in helping to prevent the continued pollution of the stream. Coincidentally at the same time, VCU started a community engagement grant program. A proposal was submitted to gain funding to help develop awareness of the Reedy Creek watershed within the community, especially among the children who attend the elementary school near to the wetlands. The rationale was that through education and awareness, citizens of the watershed would become more inclined to protect the stream and prevent pollution.

The grant was funded and provided resources to host two environmental festivals at the elementary school during the 2007-2008 academic year. A graduate student took the lead in designing active learning centers for the festivals. VCU students, through their service-learning efforts, provided leadership at the different learning centers that focused on such watershed themes as the water cycle, erosion and deposition, recycling and water conservation. Additionally a service-learning ecology class from VCU took the students and their families on a tour of the nearby wetlands, emphasizing small animals and plants.

            In the same year, the councilman for the district that contains the largest portion of the watershed kept his campaign promise by supervising monthly cleanups that brought citizens to various sections of his district, including Reedy Creek, to do cleanups. VCU students participated in these efforts in conjunction with the service-learning course. As visibility increased, the local business association sent participants and support, and private schools asked if their students could help with cleanups in order to accrue necessary volunteer hours.

            In this brief summary of the project one sees that a service-learning project can easily evolve in response to insights gained and to opportunities that arise serendipitously.  In the remaining section of this paper, the different outcomes that developed from the Reedy Creek service-learning project are described.  

Harvesting Funding Opportunities

            The VCU Community Engagement Grant that provided the majority of funds for the Reedy Creek environmental festivals also spawned opportunities for gaining matching grants. A non-profit organization that supports education about the environment and a state environmental office each provided additional funds to help purchase permanent and non-reusable educational materials. Teachers at the elementary school attended the fall and spring environmental festivals and hosted VCU service-learning students who helped with environmental projects in their classrooms. The faculty participated in a staff development workshop that featured a tour of the wetlands led by a VCU ecologist and distribution of grade-appropriate learning materials.

In subsequent years, planning and management of the environmental festivals will transition into the hands of the school faculty. Resources will be made available to teachers so that they can use the materials throughout the year to teach about Reedy Creek as well as different wetland and environmental themes. A staff development workshop will train teachers to write grant proposals to obtain funds for maintaining the environmental learning projects.

            Through the connection with the elementary school and its vibrant administrators, the service-learning project has begun to awaken the school’s faculty and students to the value of environmental themes using the little stream that flows almost through the school’s back yard.

            Future plans for the elementary school include; (1) training the elementary students to take leadership roles for cleanups of the wetlands, and (2) teaching the school faculty about riparian ecology so that they can be environmentally literate and comfortable about guiding their students on environmental projects in the Reedy Creek wetlands. During the coming academic year, one teacher workshop day will be committed to environmental training and will be taught by a VCU ecology professor. Future service-learning students will no longer teach the environmental lessons but will provide assistance as the teachers lead the lessons themselves.

            The grants we have obtained have allowed our project to include more of the large number of VCU pre-service education students who enroll in the geography classes. The education students selected the Reedy Creek option for their service-learning requirement because it offered opportunities to work with children in an educational setting. In their reflections, students noted the paucity of environmental awareness among urban children, and also noted that they have developed useful knowledge and related activities that they can use in their future classrooms. 

Service-Learning Scholarship

            Scholarship opportunities have evolved out of the Reedy Creek service-learning project because consistent records and assessment provide essential grist for analyses. Starting in 2001, students kept consistent records of trash collected (by number of bags) and amount of recyclables that were gleaned from the trash. This information was graphed over the years and compared with major storm events, which allowed for analysis of progress in cleaning up the stream channel. Student reflections give valuable affective information that is used to fine-tune specific cleanups to make them more efficient and certainly more meaningful in terms of interpreting human- natural environment interaction.           

Expanding Educational Opportunities and Visibility of Service-Learning

            The success of the Reedy Creek service-learning projects has resulted in expanded academic opportunities for VCU students. First, because the creek’s cleanup is ongoing, two additional courses that I teach were designated as service-learning courses. One course, an honors version of an introductory geography course incorporated Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods (2005) as one of the course’s textbooks. The studyof this book and the subsequent engagement during the weekend cleanup activities gave students insight into the negative consequences of human detachment from nature. These cleanup experiences were case studies for lively discussion of textbook chapters. The geography theme of human-environment interaction and Louv’s theme of detachment from the environment were compared.

            The large lecture hall version of the same course was also taught as a service-learning course and again, the Reedy Creek cleanup continued. This course is required in the elementary education teacher preparation program and provides these students with very real-world glimpses of opportunities to learn about riparian landscapes and human desecration of natural settings. One group of students were so motivated that they eagerly attacked the uppermost reaches of the stream, never before cleaned during our on-going work projects, while another group of students focused on the Reedy Creek environmental festival. The latter group comprised all pre-service, elementary education majors who worked with the elementary school teachers and their students. The VCU students supervised the environmental festival learning centers and commented in their reflections about the valuable experience and basic knowledge they gained in teaching specific units related to water and environmental themes.

            VCU has a strong culture of service, encouraged by student participation in various student organizations and student government sponsored activities. A distribution list of the previous years’ service-learning students is used to invite students to continue their participation in the cleanups. Almost every weekend cleanup event finds at least one and sometimes more students with previous experience coming to help clean sections of the stream channel.

            As faculty members in the School of Life Sciences adapt their courses to service-learning, exciting cross-fertilization has occurred. Two ecology professors have incorporated the Reedy Creek environmental festival into their service-learning requirements. The ecology students serve as valuable “tour guides” for taking children and their families through the wetlands during the festivals. These students bring an expertise of riparian knowledge that is not always part of the repertoire of the students enrolled in the geography classes. These mutual experiences and shared teaching materials, resources and ideas have enabled all three professors to expand their influence on preservation of wetlands and surrounding natural landscapes within an urban setting.

            The VCU Division of Community Engagement provides oversight and training for the service-learning program and trains student peer teaching assistants for any faculty member who teaches a service-learning designated course. As students successfully complete a service-learning course and find much academic enrichment and personal satisfaction in the experience, they become potential recruits to serve as service-learning teaching assistants. Every year, I recruit my most energetic and committed students to consider enrolling in the service-learning teaching assistant training so they can serve as the following year’s teaching assistants. At VCU, the program gives honors college credit for the 1.5 hour training session and 1.5 hour honors credit during the semester that the student serves as a teaching assistant. Then if the students choose to serve a second semester as teaching assistants, they receive a stipend. Training is provided by the graduate service-learning teaching assistants who themselves are experienced in service-learning.

            One graduate student has used the Reedy Creek project to propel her way into a fully funded graduate program. She used her experience as the Reedy Creek teaching assistant to co-author a peer review article, to co-author the aforementioned grant proposals and to serve as lead organizer for the Reedy Creek Environmental Festivals (Parece and Aspaas 2007).  

Reedy Creek’s Impact on Community Organizing

            We continue to hope that the community that borders this unique and beautiful stream will take full responsibility to protect the stream from pollution and degradation. Unfortunately, this is not the case, as the trash and pollutants are a product of the community and commercial corridor that lie in the watershed. However, small glimmers of hope have started to arise as a consequence of the continued visibility of the service-learning students. It’s a bit difficult for a community to disregard twenty to twenty-five students in bright orange vests, walking through the neighborhood and along the stream banks carrying orange bags filled with trash.

            The councilman whose district includes part of the watershed was the first to see the service-learning students as an asset in his effort to clean up his district. Our graduate teaching assistant passed on knowledge about bureaucratic procedures for getting cleaning supplies, ordering trash pickup, and locating recycling stations to the district councilman. One Saturday each month is designated as cleanup day and VCU students cooperate to help clean the designated areas. Usually a church acts as host and provides lunch afterwards for the workers, and students then have an opportunity to visit with community members.

            Because of constant visibility of the students performing the cleanups, a dormant community coalition that supported Reedy Creek has come back to life. The Reedy Creek Coalition has linked with VCU to identify opportunities to engage local residents in contributing to the health of the stream. The coalition actively partners with the non-profit environmental organization Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay to design projects that will help to educate homeowners about storm water runoff. The coalition’s plans continue to include service-learning students. 

Professional Growth

            Increased visibility of the stream cleanup provided university-wide opportunities for me to enhance the university’s service-learning program. At the annual training sessions for the service-learning teaching assistants and the semester-long training sessions for the next cadre of service-learning faculty, I gave presentations related to such themes as using service-learning teaching assistants effectively, selecting viable community partners, designing meaningful syllabi and integrating course content and service-learning experiences. While I have many different service-learning opportunities, the Reedy Creek option is used most often as a valuable case study.

            Because of my willingness to present to different audiences and recognized success in teaching service-learning courses, I was recruited to serve as the inaugural service-learning scholar at VCU. The position provides for a reduced teaching load while the service-learning scholar interfaces with different units and faculty to encourage adapting service-learning to their programs and to specific courses. The position focuses on collaboration across the university with faculty and administrators along with off-campus presentations at other institutions of higher learning and community centers. 

Personal Growth

            Just as students comment on the affective aspects of the service-learning experience in their required reflections, I also acknowledge that working with community partners, making on-site visits when students are involved in their various projects (including the stream cleanup), and serving alongside students as they work at their projects has allowed me to develop a stronger sense of community commitment. As a newcomer to the east coast and to a large urban area, service-learning has provided the bridge to engender a sense of belonging and caring, thus helping me to become what John B. Cobb, Jr. calls a “person-in-community” (Cobb 2006). These are individuals who see themselves as vital participants in securing quality of life for all in the local area in which they live.  

Can the Reedy Creek Service-Learning Project Serve as a Helpful Model?

            After reflecting on the multifaceted opportunities that resulted from the stream cleanup, one needs to stand back and ask “What are the features of this project that resulted in such positive impacts on so many different groups?”  The following comments may help to explain how the Reedy Creek project is proving to be beneficial. These comments are generalized so that readers can consider similar applications for service-learning in other contexts, such as shoreline cleanups, stream restoration projects, scenic highway cleanups, and  projects performed in conjunction with city or state parks to create natural areas for study and building environmental awareness.

            First, Reedy Creek has benefited from growing national and international environmental awareness. I remember the first Earth Day and the push for environmental awareness that was a hallmark of the 1970s. Similarly, a younger generation that has been exposed to numerous national media efforts including An Inconvenient Truth (Paramount Pictures 2006) and the current “green footprint” media blitz can see projects like Reedy Creek as viable opportunities to show their willingness to help improve the environment where they live. Youth, energy, and hard work are applied to a very real environmentally degraded situation, and visible improvement is the outcome.

            Secondly, location in a large metropolitan area that is also the seat of state and federal government offices means that a host of regulatory offices, non-profit organizations, and leaders are accessible for moving environmental projects forward. Because Reedy Creek is a tributary in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, it receives considerable attention. The report card for the Bay shows a failing grade year after year (Chesapeake Bay Report Card 2008). However, stream by stream and tributary by tributary, the impact of a large population and industry may be mitigated when each tributary receives the same intensive, long-term attention as Reedy Creek.

            Jurisdictional circumstances have helped to make the cleanups easier. Because its geography confines the stream’s watershed to the boundaries of the City of Richmond, contacts for assistance can focus on city governmental entities. Calls can be made to the city waste removal units, the clean city commission and the city environmental police. Council districts work amicably with each other to provide support and engender community participation. Churches, private schools, the aforementioned citizens’ coalition and civic associations all play important roles.

            At the university level, one finds a long and very constructive history of university-community interaction. VCU’s history as a commuter campus means that historically its student body helped to connect the university with the city’s and neighboring counties’ populations. Furthermore, the location of the campus has allowed for rich interaction with public schools, hospitals and various social service groups serving inner city residents.

            Service-learning at VCU is housed under the aegis of the provost’s office which garners academic legitimacy for the service-learning program. The VCU promotion and tenure guidelines reward exceptional instructional activities, especially those that support the university’s long-term goal of student engagement and active learning (Virginia Commonwealth University 2008). When tied with related scholarship, these are highly beneficial in promotion and tenure decisions. Likewise, one notes that the professional disciplinary pedagogy journals are increasingly interested in publishing research articles about service-learning.

            The student organizations at VCU promote a culture of volunteerism. Student organizations receive funding only when members have contributed volunteer hours to designated not-for-profit organizations. This attitude of volunteerism is amenable to the service work students complete for a service-learning course. Students with experience and enthusiasm for volunteering are ready to tackle the more intellectually demanding work required of a service-learning course.

            Ironically, the bounty of opportunities and rewards that have developed from the Reedy Creek cleanup may be attributable to the absence of what one might call necessary institutional fabric. For example, neither local nor state government entities nor any non-profit organizations have taken direct ownership for the health of the entire Reedy Creek watershed. While this may explain the current level of contamination and pollution, it also has allowed me and my students to take a leadership roll in the cleanups and educational projects. With no dominant community organization making decisions, the service-learning project has effectively identified issues, themes and made timely decisions on behalf of the creek. For example, severe storm events can be addressed almost immediately. Year-by-year investigations of the channel help to focus attention on specific sections. Community groups can be recruited without concern for overstepping particular boundaries of authority. Elementary school faculty and students can be brought into the effort through educational projects. Lack of attention in the past to the condition of the stream by existing institutions means that any effort on the part of VCU students through the service-learning project reaps considerable positive recognition, and where resources are stretched thin, the service work helps to fill voids. 

Conclusion

            Indeed, the little stream has given much in terms of student, community, and faculty development. I would like to report that after seven years, Reedy Creek is clean, pollution free, and a wonderful natural preserve deep in the heart of the state capital that is enjoyed and cherished by the large population that calls its watershed home—but we have not yet obtained those goals. However, they are visible on the horizon. And when Reedy Creek becomes the valued riparian landscape of the community through which it flows, what then?  The model of multiple levels of interaction, horizontal integration, flexibility of activity, and certainly the importance of a reward structure for students, faculty and community can be applied to the many other streams that flow through the city and eventually empty into the Chesapeake Bay.

            Reedy Creek is not unique; neither is this model. Other watersheds can benefit from a strong service-learning program in the institutions of higher learning that border their channels. A long-term commitment entered with collaboration at multiple levels that brings community, students, faculty and educators together working through a variety of efforts should prove invaluable in bringing once polluted streams back to life.

References

Anon. 1998. The Ditchification of Reedy Creek. Richmond Magazine August:  45. 

Chesapeake Bay Report Card. www.eco-check.org/reportcard/chesapeake/ (Accessed March 17, 2008). 

Cobb, John B., Jr. 2006. Christian faith and the degradation of creation.  In Simpler Living Compassionate Live:  A Christian perspective, ed., Michael Schut,  pp. 80-89. Denver:  Living the Good News. 

Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. 2005. www.deq.virginia.gov/coastal/description/1998projects/55-98.html and www.deq.virginia.gov/tmdl and http://gisweb.deq.virginia.gov/deqims/factsheet2004.cfm (Accessed March 20, 2008).  

Crump, J.R. 2002. Learning by doing: Implementing community service-based learning. Journal of Geography 101 (4):  44-152. 

Dorsey, B. 2001. Linking theories of service-learning and undergraduate geography education. Journal of Geography  100 (3):  124-132. 

Eflin, J. and A. Sheaffer. 2006. Service-learning in watershed-based initiatives: Keys to education for sustainability in geography. Journal of Geography 105 (1):  33-44. 

Louv, R. 2005. Last Child in the Woods:  Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder. North Carolina:  Algonquin Books. 

Paramount Pictures. 2006. An Inconvenient Truth. Hollywood, CA:  Paramount Pictures. 

Parece, T.E. and H.R. Aspaas. 2007. Reedy Creek Cleanup:  The evolution of a university geography service-learning project. Journal of Geography  106 (4):  153-162. 

Richmond, City of. 2008. www.richmond.com (Accessed March 27, 2008). 

Shanabruch, W. 2005. The Reedy Creek Coalition and employee of the Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. Interviewed by T.E. Parece in Richmon,d VA, November 22, 2005. 

Sinclair, C., M. Patey, and D. Starook. 2001. Early tenants prove the success of Richmond Wetlands Project. Stormwater January/February:  46-51. 

Virginia Commonwealth University. http://www.vcu.edu/vcu2020  (Accessed May 12, 2008).

Helen Ruth Aspaas is associate professor of geography in the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University. She teaches courses in human geography, world regional geography, and the geography of Africa. She is currently serving a two-year commitment as the Service-Learning Scholar for the Division of Community Engagement. She publishes on geography pedagogy and economic develop for rural women, domestically and in East Africa. She is co-author of ancillaries for a world regional geography text. During the summers, she devotes time to good land stewardship on her family’s ranch in Colorado. 

Email:  hraspaas@vcu.edu