Analyzing Capitalism in Kindergarten?

After spending a whole year exploring ecosystems, human and plant relationships, and community knowledge around systems and strategies for health and wellbeing, we wanted to take this year to keep pushing our systems thinking through a new series of angles, to challenge the tendency to only teach about systems in elementary within the context of teaching ecosystems, and to build out a unit that continued allowing students to see, analyze, and challenge the major systems that mediate our lives but often pass under the radar, unstudied and unchallenged within school.

Knowing that young scholars are capable and excited to deal in both the concrete and immediate as well as the abstract and the big picture, we tried out an extended unit adapting a variety GLAD (Guided Language Acquisition Design) strategies and Agency By Design Maker Centered Learning strategies.

This post is a simple overview of the process we went through.  Reach out if you want to talk it through in more detail, and check out the post The Art of Seeing: Critical Thinking Through Drawing to get a closer look into the first segment of this larger unit.

(Agency By Design’s Maker Centered Learning Disposition)

To begin the study capitalism and see where it took us, we approached it through the angle of Toys and Games. Following the arch of Agency By Design’s Maker Centered Learning Dispositions, our first mini unit focused on Looking Closely at discrete toy and game systems, and spending time drawing, questioning, and getting to know their parts and the materials that made them. We understood systems at the material level (this basketball is a system made of different interacting parts) and the conceptual level (the basketball is a discrete system that interacts with other discrete systems. It exists in the world as a result of systems and in

(Framing for the first section of our unit built with the students as we teased apart systems at different scales and of different origins before emphasizing that no system exists in isolation, but instead seemingly discrete systems are actually in relationship to each other. This is an adaptation of the GLAD “Graphic Organizer Input Chart and Pictorial Input Chart” strategies, laying out the schema for the unit.)

We built our observational drawing skills and sharpened our discernment/understanding of an object’s origin. Was this system a product of human creation? ...of natural origin? ...of both?

We emphasized that though we can study systems in isolation, they do not exist in isolation, they are always in relationship to other systems.

We practiced recognizing and finding systems at different scales. Students brainstormed as many examples of “relational” systems as they could think of (that is, systems in interaction with one another. They could be BIG, more than two systems interacting, or SMALL, two systems interacting. They could be composed of all natural systems, all engineered systems, or a mixture of both.

(A first grader’s brainstorm of different types of relational systems, systems in relationship with one another)

We began to Explore Complexity by looking at capitalist systems for extraction production distribution and disposal and considering at every step of the way how the specifics of each step in the process, each part, affected people and the planet.

(Borrowing from the short video “Story of Stuff” we mapped out the linear model of the materials economy.)

Finally, the week schools shut down during the pandemic, we began entering into Finding Opportunity. The direction I planned was to challenge students to design toys with the whole system in mind. What materials they would use, considering what they know about the impacts of extraction? How the toy would make it people, and who would it make it to, considering what they know about markets and money? What would happen to it when someone didn’t want it anymore, considering what they know about disposal? The students showed so much interest in the topic of waste and redistribution, and were very intent on designing new systems and solutions to challenge this contradiction they honed in on, between the over abundance of trash and waste, the overabundance of extraction and destruction, and the overabundance of people living without those very things that others are throwing away. This is highly complex intellective thinking, happening in TK, in Kinder, in First Grade and Second grade, and deeply tuned into their natural social responsibility as a member of a global collective.