Inquiring into prior conceptions held by Spanish students on water, Marcén (2006) finds they are aware of its importance for living beings, for health and personal hygiene, and its usefulness in daily life; furthermore, they possess considerably more knowledge, such as the existence of different types of water, the existence of a cycle that keeps it in continuous movement, the need to manage it appropriately, and so on. These findings largely coincide with those of Havu-Nuutinen et al. (2018) in Finland.

In contrast to the foregoing, authors such as Castelltort et al. (2014), Liefländer et al. (2016) and Pozo-Muñoz et al. (2023) find that many students are unaware of the impact human activity has on the water cycle, or of its consequences on both the quantity and quality of the resource.

Water pollution is a topic that has been referenced considerably by scholars according to Marcén (2006), Jaén et al. (2014), and Pozo-Muñoz et al. (2023), among others, who indicate that students identify pollutants such as soap and toothpaste, but not domestic waste such as ‘fats and oils, organic matter, solid waste, detergents and cleaning products’ (Castelltort et al., 2014, p.56).

Moreover, according to Castelltor (2015), students lack knowledge on the circulation of water in their own cities, are unsure about where water comes from, do not conceive of any type of purification before consumption and fail to establish differences between purification and treatment. Hernández (2014) finds that students are unaware that all of the water that reaches their homes is drinkable, even that which enters the cistern, and that once used it flows to a sewer system where it must be treated before being returned to the environment.

To summarise, it is observed that a large number of the conceptions discovered in students incline towards a more traditional water culture, in which water resources are not altered by human beings in such a transcendental way.

These conceptions can be reinforced by the cultural image transmitted in school through textbooks and official curricular content (Marcén and Cuadrat, 2012; Pozo-Muñoz et al., 2023). In a study on both Spanish and Colombian school texts (Benarroch et al., 2022a), it was found they maintained an amorphous posture and did not comprehensively advocate a water culture that promotes sustainability.

The difficulties students have with water, its usage and consumption can be exacerbated due to lack of knowledge on the part of their teachers (McCarroll and Hamann, 2020; Kwee and Dos Santos, 2023). Benarroch et al. (2022b) and Ramírez-Segado et al. (2023) found that future educators in Spain lack optimal knowledge for deploying useful teaching-learning processes in order to raise awareness and evaluate solutions adapted to the new era. They suggest their main source of information comes from the media and not academic training.

Thus, although there is evidence of a positive transformation of teaching about water, it is still frequently the case that water is addressed in a decontextualised way, without relevance for students (Sammel, 2016) and it is presented as a natural resource subject to a cycle that is also natural and not threatened by human presence (Sammel, 2016; Amahmid et al., 2018; Martínez-Borreguero et al., 2020).

In this vein, studies such as those by Marcén and Cuadrat (2012), Castelltor (2015), Amahmid et al. (2018), Benninghaus et al. (2018), Scoarize et al. (2021), Castro-Velásquez and Benarroch (2023), and Pozo-Muñoz et al. (2023), among others, argue that when interdisciplinary context-based teaching approaches are implemented, with a predominance of argumentation and inquiry, there is a considerable improvement in learning.

This study supposes that the acquiring of scientific knowledge, values and habits that promote the sustainability of water heritage from school can improve through the sequencing of teaching activities focused on those proposed by the New Water Culture.

For the design of the teaching proposal on water, there was a consideration of the need for a starting theoretical framework and it was decided to adopt that comprising the so called New Water Culture (NWC), which addresses the topic of water from the multiple perspectives of ethical, environmental, social, economic, political and emotional values integrated into water ecosystems (Vilches and Gil-Pérez, 2009; Fundación Nueva Cultura del Agua, 2023).

Benarroch et al. (2021) summarised, in seven contexts, the differences between the traditional vision of water, referred to as the old water culture, and the vision from sustainable development promoted by the NWC. These are shown in Table 1.

A number of methodological and strategic principles were also adopted. These were, in essence:

The proposal had to be contextualised both at individual and large scale level (from local to global), involving the promotion of changes in individual behaviours, customs and lifestyles given that, as irrelevant as they may appear, when multiplied by the millions of people around the world, they can translate into substantial changes (Vilches and Gil-Pérez, 2009). Teaching in context has the objective of preparing young people as citizens who are critical and able to make fundamental decisions, emphasising relationships between scientific content and socio-cultural aspects (Pérgola and Galagovsky, 2020; Khiri et al., 2023).

It was necessary for the proposal to mobilise emotions in students, given the importance of the role played by interest, curiosity, imagination and eagerness to interact and ask questions in school learning (Harlen, 2013; Jiménez-Liso et al., 2020).

Given the strong interdisciplinary nature of the water problem, there was a need for the proposal to recognise the contributions that could be incorporated from different curricular areas. Nevertheless, and to be realistic, it had to at least integrate the areas of Natural Sciences and Social Sciences, which are those most directly involved in this cultural transformation process of teaching about water (Tan, 2020; Castro-Velásquez and Benarroch, 2023).

In terms of resources, priority is afforded to those that promote the development of critical models in relation to socio-scientific matters. Press releases particularly stand out in this regard, as they show differences of opinion that are useful for discussing water related controversies (Vílchez, 2009; Díaz, 2019).

As part of the proposal different ways of grouping should be favoured. In this way, students approach knowledge through individual reflection, interaction and teamwork, in the same way as scientists (Sanmarti and Márquez, 2017; Raviv et al., 2019).

The experience took place in a secondary school, in Engativá (Bogotá, Colombia), over the months of June and July 2022. Engativá is located in the north west of the city, an area where the basins of the Salitre and Bogotá rivers meet (Secretaría Distrital de Ambiente de Bogotá, 2020). This locality is home to the only waste water treatment plant in the capital, with the capacity to deal with 30% of the city’s water. Engativá is remarkable for its high level of biodiversity and water availability; however, demand for water is high and it shows marked problems relating to pollution (Secretaría Distrital de Ambiente de Bogotá, 2022).

The single group that was the object of study comprised 37 students (49% girls and 51% boys) from the last year of compulsory education, aged between 14 and 17 (average = 14.9, SD = 1.00). The students came from low (32%) and middle (68%) socio-economic strata.

The habitual teachers of the Social Sciences and Natural Sciences subjects of the study object group voluntarily agreed to implement the proposal in the classroom. These educators were aged 36 and 39 and had teaching experience of 12 and 16 years, respectively.

Únete a la Nueva Cultura del Agua was structured into 10 two-hour tasks. The teaching proposal is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10481/81284. It mainly comprises one teacher’s book and one student workbook.

The teaching proposal was shared with the two participating teachers and their suggestions were gathered in the final product. It was then presented to the students, requesting their participation. Their participation was corroborated with the informed consent of their parents.

A mixed quasi-experimental single group pretest-posttest study was developed, based on the design, implementation and evaluation of the learning sequence. The statistical analyses were carried out with the program IBM SPSS version 25.

The monitoring and evaluation of the proposal should favour summative and formative assessment. For the former, a pretest and posttest questionnaire was used. For the latter, a monitoring questionnaire was designed for each session, generating a total of 10 monitoring questionnaires, via which students were asked for an assessment of their own work (self-evaluation), of the work of the classmates in their small group (co-evaluation) and of the work of the teacher and class materials (hetero-evaluation). There is also an analysis of the student workbook entries.

The students, upon finalising each session: (a) self-evaluated their work, (b) coevaluated their classmates (c) hetero-evaluated the teacher, (d) the class and the activities. Figure 4 shows the averages of the four dimensions evaluated for the 10 tasks and their average as a whole. The left-hand columns result from the Likert-type scale and those on the right from the numerical classifications. All of the scores exceed the theoretical average (2.5). At a general level, the students gave better scores to the teacher, classes and activities; then the work of their classmates and, lastly, their own performance.

The laboratory water analysis practical (task 8) was the most highly scored and classified task of the whole sequence. This is followed by task 6, which addresses the aqueduct and sewer system of Bogotá. The task with the lowest average scores in the Likert-type scale was task 1, which studies supposed water imbalance compared to the natural balance of water.

Task 10 is the final task of the teaching proposal. In it, students were firstly asked to suggest three strategies that encourage responsible consumption and water saving, both in their local environment and on a large scale. They were required to indicated how they would be implemented, how frequently and which agents would be involved.

The students produced a total of 99 initiatives. The majority implied a reduction of consumption for an indirect water saving (52.5%); another not inconsiderable percentage (42.5%) were proposals for direct water saving. The remaining 5% covers five proposals that argue for control of waste and pollution through economic cost. The strategies mainly involve the family group (79.7%) and students as individuals (16.5%), with only the other 3.8% involving other households or relations.

Initiatives for reducing weekly meat consumption particularly stand out. It is proposed that meat be replaced by other types of food whose production requires less water usage (Figure 5). Moreover, with the aim of reducing the consumption of electronic devices and other goods, such as clothing, it is suggested they be better cared for to favour more prolonged use (Figure 6). A single strategy proposes the recycling of materials (plastics and paper) as an indirect water saving measure. All of these initiatives that imply indirect water saving are now in the knowledge of these students and they must be attributed to the learning afforded by the teaching proposal.

The strategies for direct water saving are focused on restricting personal and domestic water consumption, and recycling water used in the home or rainwater. Although the former were initiatives associated with knowledge students already held in the pretest, the latter are products of the learning acquired from the teaching proposal.

As well as the proposals for direct and indirect water saving, the five proposals that argue for the control of wastefulness and pollution via economic cost are particularly interesting. Three of them imply not mixing (used) oil with water and taking it to authorised collection points to avoid domestic waste pollution via the sewer system. These links between waste and water saving are also products of the learning gained through the teaching proposal.

Following the end of task 10, to finish the teaching proposal, students were asked to reflect on current development models. The highest percentage (67.7%) focuses on learning also associated with task 10 (see Figure 7 as an example), but another not inconsiderable 32.3% relates to fundamental reflections on content addressed in other spaces of the teaching proposal (see Figure 8 as an example).

It is observed that students focus their reflections mainly on criticism of current society and its development model, where consumerism creates an indirect and unsustainable consumption of water, as also shown in the strengths detected in the pretest-posttest. The texts, furthermore, make proposals of change based on the duty to care for and save water heritage, due to its importance for life (vital-water), for citizens (citizen-water) and for economic development (economy-water). In addition, they suggest the reduction in the demand for water, a resource conceived as non-renewable due to its over-exploitation. Attention is paid, to a lesser extent, to pollution and citizen participation in water care and management, without losing sight of the fact that over half of the reflections employ binding plural language.