[DSRP Evidence](https://dsrpevidence.org/) # Observers of the world: Primary grade students imagining solutions for broken environmental and social systems ## Details **Authors** Curwen, Margaret S. and Ardell, Amy and MacGillivray, Laurie **Year** 2024 **Publisher** Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 358-388 (SAGE Publications) **Kind of work** article **Discipline** Education **Secondary disciplines** Human Development, Environment & Sustainability **Kind of engagement** scholarly **Applied** false [Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984241307381) 10.1177/14687984241307381 ## In authors' words ### What they set out to do (purpose) To examine how teachers and students in a K-1 classroom apply a systems thinking view of the world's interconnectedness, using multimodal literacy practices to analyze problematic social and ecological issues. ### Who or what was studied (sample) One K-1 classroom of five- and six-year-olds at Sycamore School, an independent school, with two teachers (pseudonyms Traci and Fiona). The classroom roll is not given. The wider study from which the case is drawn covered eight K-5 educators and 70 students across two sites, the second a Title I public partner school. ### How they did it (methods) Year-long qualitative holistic case study. Data: eight classroom visits, five semi-structured interviews with teachers, administrators and a systems thinking consultant, two student focus groups, 120 classroom photographs, a full-day teacher-led professional development session, and classroom artifacts including systems maps and charts. Analysis proceeded in three stages: literacy events were coded first (block building, reading literature, writing poems); those instances were then analyzed using Cabrera and Colosi's four patterns of thinking; the resulting patterns were grouped into three themes by a grounded theory approach — cultivating connections, students' developing solutions, and students' agency. ### What they found (results) Children linked local and global systems, distinguished human systems from machine systems, and named broken systems including pollution and homelessness. Through iterative building and redesign with blocks and recycled materials they produced imagined machines as solutions, which they presented to families and to a partner school. The authors conclude that multimodal practices allow young children to express complex ideas beyond conventional writing, and that the children's work is evidence that five- and six-year-olds can engage with wicked problems. ## Commentary ### In short A year-long case study of a K-1 classroom that uses Cabrera and Colosi's four patterns as the analytic lens for how five- and six-year-olds reason about broken environmental and social systems. ### In more detail Curwen, Ardell and MacGillivray spent a year in a kindergarten-and-first-grade classroom where systems thinking had been adopted as a way of organizing instruction, and they chose DSRP as the instrument for reading what the children produced. The four patterns enter at the second of three analytic stages: literacy events are coded first, the four patterns are then applied to those events, and grounded-theory categorization follows. Each pattern is defined for the reader before it is used — distinctions as the identifiable differences between things or concepts, systems as parts working together toward a goal, relationships as actions between people or phenomena — and each then appears in the findings as a description of what the children did. The children distinguished robots from humans and one kind of machine from another; they identified multiple systems and the interdependency that kept them running; they traced relationships between machines and the contexts those machines sat in; and they looked at the world, in the authors' phrase, from their different perspectives. The classroom work itself was multimodal rather than written: block construction, redesign with recycled materials, systems maps, poems, and a presentation to families and a partner school. Plectica is credited in passing as a mapping tool developed by Cabrera and Cabrera. The paper is not evaluating DSRP and raises no objection to it; it adopts the framework as the lens and reports what the lens shows about five- and six-year-olds. ### Response The paper puts DSRP to a use the theory invites and rarely receives: as a description of what children do before anyone has taught them a vocabulary for it. All four patterns turn up in the talk and the building of five- and six-year-olds, which bears directly on the claim that the patterns are structural rather than an expert acquisition — a classroom of first-graders is a harder case than a graduate seminar. The authors also keep the patterns distinct from the activities, so that block building is the event and part-whole organization is what the event reveals, which is the right relation between the two. What the paper does not supply is a codebook. The second analytic stage is described in a sentence, and a reader cannot tell which utterances or artifacts were assigned to which pattern, how co-occurring patterns were handled, or whether a second rater agreed. For a study whose contribution is that the four patterns are visible in young children's work, the procedure for seeing them is the part most worth publishing. **Patterns it shows** D, S, R, P **Added** 2026-10-14 **How to cite this** Curwen, Margaret S. and Ardell, Amy and MacGillivray, Laurie (2024). Observers of the world: Primary grade students imagining solutions for broken environmental and social systems. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 358-388 (SAGE Publications).