For the past couple of weeks our third graders have been working on saving New York City. They have been tasked with creating a blueprint for Manhattan that will stop the decay and destruction that has been causing plant and animal life to die at alarming rates. This blueprint encompasses plans for future housing, transportation, food sources, education, religion, government, health, community life, and the natural environment.

Real or not real? It’s hard to say. Their project is part of our City of the Future curriculum, the culmination of our year-long study in which they learned about the first societies and peoples of Manhattan. After spending most of the year studying the Lenape and colonial New Amsterdam, they have taken the best practices from these and present-day cultures as the basis to imagine a future New York City where plants, wildlife, and people thrive. They created designs for accessible food, housing and healthcare for all, in which all people’s ideas and beliefs are included and celebrated, as well a city that is surrounded by clean air, water, trees. In short, a sustainable city in which fairness, natural beauty, and happiness abound.

The driving impetus for the project comes out of a drama framework in which the students were selected as agents for “Team X”: a top-secret team that required skills that our third graders were somehow uniquely suited for (qualifications such as “solving problems, asking excellent questions, a willingness to get dirty, experience with time-travel, and being under the age of 10…”). As part of the story within the ongoing drama, the children learned that New York City is in a state of emergency because plant and animal life are dying, and, unless they present their plan for saving the city, we are all left to the less-than-reassuring solutions by the “Mayor’s team of experts.”

The students know that they need to take matters into their own hands. They understand the sense of urgency and the sadness created from pollution, poverty, inequality… They are confident, not only because they feel smart and capable, but because they have knowledge of the past, of what was valued and perhaps lost. They know that the truly big ideas require teamwork and collaboration, which they practice and demonstrate daily. And they are young, brave, curious, adventurous and imaginative enough that, as one child said, “we can make the impossible possible.” These third graders have taken on the responsibility to affect change for the future.

Real or not real? Perhaps it’s not so hard to say after all.