Many of the seventh graders from Oliver Middle School had been to the Nashville Zoo before, but they had never experienced it quite like this.
When they visited on a brisk but sunny day in early March, the students and their science teachers not only saw many of the resident animals but also learned about their movements, their diets, their digestive systems, and, yes, their poop.
“Who Dung It?” was the punny title of a learning station focused on the waste produced by various carnivores, herbivores, and omnivores and why it takes on different shapes and textures based on what they eat and how they digest it. (The "waste" on display was fake.)
“I learned about how animals can digest different foods and how the cells in their body kind of like work or decompose it,” one Oliver Middle student wrote after the visit. “I liked how I saw the cute red panda and how we got to see the animals and look at the waste.”
It’s all part of the Wildlife Research Scholars Program, a new partnership between MNPS’s Overton Cluster schools and the Nashville Zoo. The goal of the program is to ensure that all students will be able to connect classroom learning to real life through their experiences at the zoo.
"Partnerships that support the Wildlife Research Scholars Program in the Overton Cluster demonstrate the power of collaboration in education,” said Dr. Jennifer Berry, the district’s director of STEAM and science. “By connecting students and teachers with experts at the Nashville Zoo, we are creating hands-on learning experiences that bring classroom lessons to life and inspire the next generation of conservationists and scientists."
Connecting Classrooms to the Real World
With a conservation mindset, the collaboration aims to give students and teachers unique experiences and authentic, standards-based interdisciplinary learning that connects their classrooms to the real world. Overton Cluster students will visit, work with, and engage with zoo staff multiple times throughout their K-12 experience. Students at Overton High School will have expanded access to interdisciplinary research projects, and zoo programming will be more integrated into the Academies of Nashville pathways at Overton.
Croft Middle, McMurray Middle, and Oliver Middle seventh graders visited the zoo on separate days in March. Each expedition combined live demonstrations, docent-led stations, and guided research activities as students explored various aspects of animal biology, behavior, and conservation, reinforcing the science curriculum and fostering critical thinking skills. 
Before their visits, students participated in lessons focusing on comparative animal anatomy, body systems – with an emphasis on digestion and diet – and animal movement. At the zoo, they used their research journals to record observations, data, and reflections.
When the Oliver Middle students got to the clouded leopard’s lair, a zoo docent told them about the animal’s chemical digestion system, which makes the most of its meat-heavy diet, and its unusual ability to climb down a tree headfirst. At the Grassmere Historic Farm, they learned about ruminant animals like sheep and cows, which can digest grass and other plants, and non-ruminant animals like donkeys and horses, which have to eat more because they can’t chew as much.
“On my field trip, I learned more about animals such as how goats are ruminant animals,” one Oliver student noted. “I like all the facts and discoveries on the field trip, and I got to see unique animals.”
The partnership between MNPS and the zoo also is creating professional development opportunities for district educators. Greg Smith, an interdisciplinary science and research instructor at Overton High School, and Sarah Huneycutt, manager of experiential learning for cluster support, will be traveling to Africa this summer with scientists from the zoo to study the ecosystem of the forests and grasslands of northwestern Zimbabwe and northeastern Botswana, with a focus on flora and fauna as well as geology, culture, and conservation.