[DSRP Evidence](https://dsrpevidence.org/) # Applications of Systems Thinking in Honors Education: The Justice Challenge ## Details **Authors** Bott, Rebecca C. and Kotinek, Jonathan D. and Nichols, Timothy J. and Appel, Heidi and Radasanu, Andrea and Hart, Joy L. **Year** 2025 **Publisher** Honors in Practice (National Collegiate Honors Council), vol. 21, pp. 205-222 **Kind of work** article **Discipline** Education **Secondary disciplines** Agriculture & Food, Environment & Sustainability **Kind of engagement** scholarly **Applied** false [Read it](https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/nchchip/448) ## In authors' words ### What they set out to do (purpose) The authors set out to introduce systems thinking to honors educators, review how it has been used in honors curricula, which they describe as rarely studied, and report on a nationwide honors collaborative that taught students systems tools and applied them to food justice and climate justice. ### Who or what was studied (sample) Students from multiple U.S. institutions across a three-year program; post-program survey responses of N = 76 in year one (76 percent response rate) and N = 40 in year two (53 percent). The six authors are based at six universities. The article does not state total enrollment. ### How they did it (methods) A yearlong, repeated program funded by a three-year USDA NIFA Higher Education Challenge grant, themed Food Justice, Climate Justice, and Sustainable Agriculture. Each cycle ran an opening workshop, an interdisciplinary online fall colloquium, and a spring signature experience (an in-person design challenge, a virtual hackathon, or a field course), plus professional development for honors administrators and faculty. Three pedagogical tools are described. In the first, participants mapped an issue as a tree and then used DSRP to interrogate the tree, beginning with distinctions among its components. In the third, students were asked to apply DSRP and VMCL during project planning for the design challenge. Outcomes were assessed by participant survey. ### What they found (results) The authors conclude that systems thinking adds a useful tool to honors pedagogy. Students who learned it reported greater skill in defining complex problems and expected to use it in their studies, careers, and civic lives. The authors report that the relationships step felt less abstract to participants than the others, and that perspectives aligned most closely with the justice lens of the program. They call for systems thinking to be integrated more deliberately into honors education. ## Commentary ### In short A six-institution honors education collaborative funded by USDA NIFA taught DSRP and VMCL to undergraduates and used them on food justice and climate justice problems. The article describes how the four patterns were sequenced with issue trees in workshops and how students applied DSRP and VMCL in project planning. ### In more detail The Justice Challenge was a three-year, nationally distributed honors program with annual themes of food justice, climate justice, and sustainable agriculture. Its authors place DSRP at the center of the program's shared vocabulary. They attribute the four rules to the Cabrera group, citing Cabrera and Colosi (2008) and Cabrera et al. (2008) for the original formulation and Cabrera and Cabrera (2019, 2020, 2022) for the rules themselves, and they restate each one: distinctions concern what falls inside and outside an entity, systems distinguish a whole from its components, relationships address connections among parts and among systems, and perspectives explore how position shapes interpretation. They also take up Cabrera and Cabrera (2018) on vision, mission, capacity, and learning, and Cabrera and Cabrera (2022) on mental models and organizational learning. The program's first pedagogical tool paired issue trees with DSRP: participants mapped a problem as a tree in the opening workshop, then used the four patterns to examine it, starting with distinctions among the tree's components. The authors note that their overall approach closely resembles the Cabreras' own, with the difference that the issue was first rendered as a tree. The third tool asked students to apply both DSRP and VMCL while planning their design-challenge projects. Reporting on what students made of the rules, the authors observe that the relationships step felt less abstract than the others and that perspectives mapped most directly onto the program's justice framing. They argue that the simplicity of the model lets students put it to work immediately after an introduction, and that systems thinking equips students to approach wicked problems. The evidence offered is participant self-report from two annual surveys. ### Response The article states the four rules accurately and cites the primary sources rather than a secondhand summary, which is not the norm in curriculum writing that borrows DSRP. Its distinctive contribution is sequencing: issue trees first, then the four patterns applied to the tree, which treats DSRP as a way of interrogating a structure students have already externalized rather than as a mapping notation of its own. The report that students found relationships more concrete and perspectives closest to the program's justice framing is a useful classroom observation, and it is worth noting that the perspectives rule carries the justice work here without the program needing a separate normative framework. Two things limit what the article establishes. The outcome evidence is student self-report on a survey, and DSRP was taught alongside issue trees, VMCL, and a design challenge, so nothing in the design separates the contribution of the four patterns from that of the other tools. The use of VMCL is also an extension rather than an application: the model was built for organizational design, and here students use it to plan a short student project. **Patterns it shows** D, S, R, P Shows it makes a difference **Added** 2026-10-22 **How to cite this** Bott, Rebecca C. and Kotinek, Jonathan D. and Nichols, Timothy J. and Appel, Heidi and Radasanu, Andrea and Hart, Joy L. (2025). Applications of Systems Thinking in Honors Education: The Justice Challenge. Honors in Practice (National Collegiate Honors Council), vol. 21, pp. 205-222.