Students at Manzo Elementary share their lunch space with Mr. Manzo, the tortoise who roams around his habitat and occasionally visits students on the grass. When it’s time for recess, they run to the playground across from the agrivoltaics plot where shishito peppers and mangoes are growing under towering solar panels.
The students at this K-5 school, many from low-income families, are learning about climate science and sustainability using their gardens — and they’re becoming stewards of their own environment.
While it is important to treat the issue of climate change with sensitivity in elementary schools, science-education expert Kristin Gunckel believes the facts cannot be kept secret from students.
Presenting science in a way that “empowers students and opens opportunities for hope” is conducive to their learning, she said.
It all began with the tortoise habitat.
The Manzo Ecology Program was established in 2006 under the leadership of Moses Thompson. Thompson is the director of the University of Arizona School Garden Workshop, an initiative that partners with Tucson’s public schools to implement sustainable agricultural systems.
Thompson was a counselor at the time and he started the program with the therapeutic aspects of nature in mind. With his tortoise project, he invited students to lug rocks one-by-one through the hallway onto the waist-high wall surrounding their new shelled friend.
Manzo, in the Tucson Unified School District, is located at 855 N. Melrose Road just south of Speedway on the west side of Interstate 10. Today, it has 15 rainwater harvesting systems, a farmstand fifth graders use for community food events, three chickens as lawn mowers and an agricultural calendar painted by Tohono O’odham students and friends.
If they finish their classwork early or are having a stressful day, students at Manzo can tend to the school gardens where heaps of chard are ready to be harvested. Among many options, they may choose to water plants in the greenhouse, break down compost or count the chicken eggs.
“I really leave it up to the students. If they want to be more involved, I kind of like to feed off their energy,” said Randal Davidson, the school’s garden coordinator.
Davidson takes pride in the Manzo way of caring for the environment, and caring for its students along the way. Students who spend time among the plants and animals at Manzo are granted this environmental therapy, and a synergy emerges when those who have an especially difficult home life channel their energy into the earth, Davidson said.
“They don’t have anywhere else to process those emotions,” he said.
In addition to learning such sciences as vermicomposting and aquaponics, Davidson’s students also relate their progress to localized climate change.
Over the summer at Manzo, Cooper’s hawks were nesting in the trees as climate records were breaking. Because it was so hot, many nestlings were starting to jump out of their nests prematurely without flight experience. Some nestlings made it, but others did not.
This was an instance Davidson chose to be honest.
He explained why the hawks were jumping and that the heat came earlier than expected.
“It’s kind of a hard lesson to learn for younger kids, but it’s also very distinctive for them because they see it happening,” he said.
“We see it. I see it. And I make sure to point it out to them,” said Davidson, regarding climate change.
Avoiding the sugar coat and helping students recognize their connection to the environment in their daily life prompts them to act in an attainable way, he said.
“It’s better for them to see it how it is right now because I didn’t see it how it was at their age. Now we have to deal with it,” said Davidson.
Discussing climate change in the classroom
In the Arizona Science Standards, there is no explicit mention of climate change or global warming.
Gunckel, a professor of science education at the University of Arizona, says this is a problem.
Gunckel believes in a holistic approach to climate change education where it is integrated into all subjects, but her focus on science classrooms is empowering and honest.
To Gunckel, it is imperative that young students learn about the effects of climate change on ecosystems and human systems alike.
“It’s not that we expect them to solve it,” she said. “We should solve it, but they have to live in this world. If we can prepare them to do that in a way that will help them understand what’s going on, we should do that.”
Along with what Gunckel says are the “pedagogies of hope,” she mentioned a framework she calls “ethics of care,” which asks questions like “How do we care for each other in this changing world?”
Jaime Camero poses a similar idea in her sixth-grade science classroom: “What it means to be a steward of the planet and what it means to engage in activities where we’re taking care of ourselves and each other in taking care of the planet.”
Camero teaches at Walter Douglas Elementary School in the Flowing Wells School District located at 3302 N. Flowing Wells Road. Camero said climate change education is a district curriculum requirement.
Although she has always prioritized environmental education throughout her eight years teaching science, Camero is now surrounded by colleagues who value these topics and hope to engage their students in local efforts.
Camero said teaching children at an early age about an issue like climate change is key to building their mindset as they grow.
“You can’t have a connection with something that you don’t have experience with,” she said.
When she was a young student, Camero was playing outdoors and connecting with nature with her father’s guidance.
To give her students that opportunity, Camero takes her classes on field trips. One trip she described is called “Lost Carnivores,” in which students set up wildlife cameras around Saguaro National Park. They base their placement on research they did in class and once the data is sent back to them, they can analyze the state of local biodiversity and gain data literacy.
Aside from taking field trips, her sixth graders study the causes of climate change and biodiversity loss in the Santa Cruz River system.
Like Gunckel, Camero said it is important for her students to understand the human impacts on the environment as a hopeful opportunity, especially because students may easily see environmental change as a lost cause.
“I want them to understand that they have the power to make changes — not just adults,” she said.
Environmentalism through the humanities lens
Annie Holub is implementing environmental perspectives in her English classes at Pima Community College.
She recently assigned her Writing 101 students an analysis of a video about water use in Arizona to expand on an argumentation lesson. She asked questions like “What is the thesis” and “How is the argument supported?”
Holub also recently crafted a curriculum surrounding the future of solar power, which was taken on by her colleague at City High School, a local charter school, in October. In this curriculum, high school seniors read stories of imagined solar-powered futures and went on to write their own stories, imagining potential outcomes of a world that is solar-powered. Students ventured ways to make life better in that situation and considered the factors of building that sort of future, Holub said.
“It doesn’t have to be dark; it can be hopeful,” Holub said, alluding to the tendencies of science fiction.
She said young people especially have the power to imagine any future, ask “what if” and turn things around.
“Things don’t have to be the way they are,” she said. “Things have not always been the way that they are.”
Budding environmentalists, flourishing impact
Camero’s students are acting on their own initiative and striving for change. After spending class time writing letters to organizations asking what kids can do for the environment as desert dwellers, students felt compelled to keep the conversation going.
One student noticed there were no recycling bins at Starbucks, so she inspired the entire class to write letters and ask those big questions. Camero said each year her students have sent letters to organizations and companies, they have gotten a response back.
Manzo students are taking action, too.
“We’ve had students who started at Manzo, and now they’re leading social justice groups in town — they’re involved in community organizing,” Davidson said.
As he walked along the solar panels and fruitful gardens, Davidson said students at Manzo have an advantage receiving environmental education in elementary school, and not only as an academic benefit.
“They care about this community,” he said, “and they want to see it grow.”
