Systems Thinking in a Second Grade Curriculum: Students Engaged to Address a Statewide Drought

Abstract

Faced with issues, such as drought and climate change, educators around the world acknowledge the need for developing students' ability to solve problems within and across contexts. A systems thinking pedagogy, which recognizes interdependence and interconnected relationships among concrete elements and abstract concepts (Meadows, 2008; Senge et al., 2012), has potential to transform the classroom into a space of observing, theorizing, discovering, and analyzing, thus linking academic learning to the real world. In a qualitative case study in one school located in a major metropolitan area in California, USA teachers and their 7-and 8-year-old students used systems thinking in an interdisciplinary project-based curriculum. Through reflection and investigations, students devised solutions and used innovative approaches to publicly engage peers and family members in taking action to address an environmental crisis.

Hopeful Discourse: Elementary Children’s Activist Responses to Modern-Day Slavery Grounded in Systems Thinking

“…Children did not just learn about intractable problems but rather they become aware of their own power to disrupt a systemic problem (Curwen et al, 2018). Systems thinking promotes the notion of interrelatedness and interdependence: It does not necessarily require a critical lens.…”

“…Today, it is the basis of many disciplines including environmental science (e.g., Meadows, 2008), organizational leadership (e.g., Wheatley, 2006), engineering (e.g., Lammi & Becker, 2013), and design (e.g., Montana-Hoyos & Lenmire, 2011). There is emerging research exemplifying how elementary classrooms have used systems thinking for instructional purposes in math (Senge et al, 2012), to foster sustainable ecosystems (Hokayem, Ma, & Jin, 2015), and to engage in interdisciplinary investigations of a statewide drought (Curwen, Ardell, MacGillivray, & Lambert, 2018). Systems thinkers may use tools such as feedback loops to identify points of leverage (Senge, 2007) that interrupt, disrupt, or alter a system.…”

“…Systems thinkers may use tools such as feedback loops to identify points of leverage (Senge, 2007) that interrupt, disrupt, or alter a system. Through rigorous and meaningful instruction, teachers and students—positioned as co-researchers—can recognize systems interdependence and interconnectedness (Curwen et al, 2018).…”

Ways of thinking in STEM-based problem solving

“…Systems thinking interacts with the other thinking forms including those displayed in Fig. 1, as well as computational thinking (Shin et al, 2022), critical thinking (Curwin et al, 2018) and mathematical thinking more broadly (Baioa & Carreira, 2022). Systems thinking is considered especially important in conceptualizing a problematic situation within a larger context and in perceiving problems in new and different ways (Stroh, 2018).…”

“…Despite its centrality across the STEM domains, systems thinking is almost absent from mathematics education (Curwin et al, 2018). This is despite claims by many researchers that modelling, systems thinking, and associated thinking processes should be significant components of students' education (Bielik et al, 2022;Jacobson & Wilenski, 2022).…”