Brooklyn Friends Second Grade Changemakers Explore Gateways to Justice and Connection

Brooklyn Friends School’s Lower School program builds foundations for global citizenship through intensely local study. Second graders at the downtown Brooklyn institution spend significant time exploring their immediate environment—not as casual observers but as emerging scholars of place, power, and community connection. This curriculum reflects the school’s belief that understanding the world begins with understanding where you stand.

The second grade social studies curriculum centers on neighborhood exploration. Students venture beyond school walls to study the Brooklyn Bridge, local parks, and surrounding streets. These field trips serve purposes beyond recreation. Children learn to read their environment, asking questions about who lives in their community, who has access to resources, and how spaces serve or fail to serve different populations.

Head of School Crissy Cáceres emphasizes that children possess sophisticated capacity for understanding complex social realities. “Children are unfiltered in the most beautiful of ways,” Cáceres explains. “They are able to sense energy and body language uniquely so. 80% of what we say, we say with our body language, and a child knows if you are there in support of them, they know if you believe in them, they know if you’re taking them seriously.”

Brooklyn Friends School operates from the premise that young people possess this capacity for understanding justice and inequity. The Quaker institution, founded in 1867, has developed a curriculum that honors this capacity while providing age-appropriate frameworks. Second graders recognize when playgrounds lack accessibility features or when certain neighborhoods have more trees than others, even if complex policy discussions remain beyond their grasp.

The Brooklyn Bridge as Classroom

Brooklyn Friends School second graders take an annual field trip to the Brooklyn Bridge. This trip provides more than history lessons about engineering and construction. Teachers guide students to consider who built the bridge, under what conditions, and who benefits from its presence.

The bridge itself tells stories about immigration, labor, class, and urban development. Second graders learn that workers, including many immigrants, risked their lives during construction. Some died. Others suffered permanent injuries from caisson disease, now known as decompression sickness. These facts introduce children to concepts of exploitation and the human cost of infrastructure.

Students examine how the bridge connects Manhattan and Brooklyn, enabling commerce and commuting. They consider who can afford to live in neighborhoods the bridge made accessible and how property values shifted after its completion. These discussions plant seeds for understanding gentrification, displacement, and economic power—concepts they will revisit with greater sophistication in later grades.

Cáceres views children as natural truth-tellers who recognize social realities adults often overlook. “Children have taught me that they speak to the raw realities and truths that are in front of them at any given time,” she notes. “Children have taught me that they are immensely courageous because they are willing to speak to those needs.”

The physical experience of walking the bridge matters. Students feel the wooden planks beneath their feet, watch cyclists and tourists, observe the skyline from the pedestrian pathway. This embodied learning creates memories that anchor abstract concepts. When they study urban planning in middle school or read literature about New York City in high school, they will have sensory experiences to connect with intellectual understanding.

Parks as Sites of Equity Study

Local parks provide another setting where Brooklyn Friends School second graders study community and access. Teachers bring students to multiple parks, asking them to compare facilities, maintenance, and usage patterns. Children notice differences in playground equipment quality, presence or absence of benches, cleanliness, and the diversity of people using each space.

These observations lead to questions about why some parks receive more resources than others. Teachers introduce concepts of city budgets, community advocacy, and decision-making processes without overwhelming seven-year-olds with bureaucratic complexity. Students learn that adults make choices about where to allocate resources and that communities can influence these choices through organized action.

The curriculum also addresses accessibility. Teachers guide students to identify barriers that might prevent certain community members from enjoying parks—lack of wheelchair ramps, absence of adult-sized swings for caregivers with disabilities, playground designs that exclude children with sensory processing differences.

Changemaker Identity Development

Brooklyn Friends School explicitly uses the term “changemaker” when describing what students are becoming. The Lower School hosts a Changemakers Assembly where students showcase projects addressing issues they have identified. Second graders participate in this assembly, presenting their neighborhood studies and action projects to the school community.

Cáceres describes children as essential partners in reimagining social structures. “Children have taught me how to dream,” she explains. “I’m a huge action dreamer, so I am constantly focused on what are the steps to do that thing that I am dreaming about. And so, I view children as dream partners, because if a child brings dreams to me, and they do all the time, including protesting, because they’re learning about activism.”

Service learning at Brooklyn Friends School emphasizes solidarity and systemic analysis rather than positioning students as helpers serving less fortunate others. Teachers guide second graders to recognize that everyone has different kinds of privilege and faces different barriers.

Quaker principles inform this philosophy. The testimony of Equality reminds students that every person has inherent worth regardless of circumstances. The testimony of Community emphasizes interconnection and mutual responsibility. Second graders practice these values through how they engage with neighborhood study—not as outside observers documenting others’ lives, but as community members examining the systems that shape all their experiences.

Cáceres describes her approach as creating space for authentic engagement. “Children always have a need because they think it will make something better,” she observes. “So I listen closely because children are my greatest dream architects.”