Learning to Connect the Dots: Developing Children’s Systems Literacy

This article discusses how to work with children's innate intuition to nurture systems literacy.

Objectives

Educators will recognize that children possess an innate understating of complex systems.
Educators will learn to nurture children's intuition that their world is interconnected and dynamic, a tightly woven web of related, interacting elements and processes.
Educators will learn how to help students “connect the dots”: to see beyond the surface, to recognize interconnections and dynamics among people, places, events and nature, and to begin thinking about how to use those interconnections to improve their world.

Systems thinking is important in biomimetic design because to truly nature, we need to go beyond emulating at a superficial level and consider how what we create is composed of systems and fits into larger ones. Starting early, based on what children intuitively understand about the world, is easier than trying to unlearn the more compartmentalized ways that adults look at the world.

In this article, educator and writer Linda Booth Sweeney points out that thinking about systems means paying attention to the interrelationships, patterns, and dynamics that surround us—and that children are naturally attuned to this. In cultivating systems literacy, educators and parents can build upon this natural understanding to help promote this integrated way of thinking. Toward the end of the article, Sweeney gives examples of simple conversations and activities that can help young people become more systems literate.