Sixth-graders discover the world in their own backyard

Along Florida's eastern shoreline, in a town of about 12,000 people, there is a public elementary school that serves a little more than 400 students in grades K-6. It is about three blocks too far from the beach for any ocean views, but inside the sixth-grade classrooms, students are learning to see the world-and their place in it.

The students, who attend Freedom 7 Elementary in Cocoa Beach, not only can identify and describe the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, but also can explain how those global goals show up as local challenges and how they are addressing them.

For example, the students who chose to focus on SDG 4-ensuring access to quality education-held tutoring sessions after school, read aloud to children in lower grades and visited libraries, handing out bookmarks with QR-code resources to raise awareness. One library visitor was so impressed that she suggested the students go to the state Legislature in Tallahassee to present their work.

For one of the sixth-grade teachers, Brevard Federation of Teachers member Tracy Lally, that local connection is the point.

"Originally, when we started this, the students would research the goals and come back with examples from places like South Africa," she says. "But we said no-look in your own backyard. Look at how these issues impact your own community and ask, 'What can I do?'"

That shift, she says, changes everything. Students studying SDG 2-eliminating hunger-volunteer with Meals on Wheels and food pantries. Groups focused on environmental goals organize beach cleanups, learn about wastewater treatment and work at wildlife rescue centers.

It is not charity for charity's sake. It is learning by doing.

Freedom 7 is an International Baccalaureate school that focuses on inquiry-based learning. For the SDGs project, that means students investigate the goals through research and apply what they learn through community action. In addition, they increase community awareness by creating infographics, designing slideshows, producing videos, making posters, choreographing dances, giving speeches and presentations, and building websites. To cap things off, they host an exhibition. This year's theme is "Movies that Change the World," and each group created movie trailers connected to their SDG research.

Along the way, they also master Florida academic standards.

For Lally, who spent years using a more traditional direct-instruction model, watching the students' growth through inquiry-based learning has been profound. They still learn the standards, but they learn them through active learning that equips them with skills they will need long after a test is over.

For example, students have to call adults, arrange volunteer opportunities and learn what to say when on the phone. At first, Lally says, one student froze and hung up at the prospect of leaving a voicemail. So the kids regrouped, wrote down what the student should say, and tried again.

"What I now see in these kids-it's life skills," she says. "They are absolutely learning life skills."

The project also instills a sense of purpose and agency, Lally says. Sixth-grader Adam Francis, who focused on addressing hunger in his community, wrote in his reflection that the work "opened my eyes."

He says he learned that people can lose jobs quickly and need resources unexpectedly, and some families depend on food pantries to eat. He also wrote that the SDG project helped him build teamwork skills, become more aware of the world around him and believe that "one person can make a difference."

Lally says that sense of purpose stays with them. Former students tell her they are still taking action-doing beach cleanups, tutoring younger children or volunteering in their communities.

The SDGs give the students a framework for understanding the world, but Freedom 7's inquiry-based learning approach gives them something more powerful: a way to see themselves as part of it.