Sunday passed me an essay from the journal of Culture and Agriculture entitled A Season for Seeds: Notes from a Schoolyard Garden. Laurie Thorpe, chronicles her personal experiences working as a researcher and garden teacher in a Michigan school, with many immigrant, poor and underprivileged students and one which is deemed low performing academically in its district. She discovers that having a garden embedded in the life of the school transforms the school community culture positively and comes to the realization that benefits cannot always be measured by quantitative data and statistics.
We put so much emphasis and skewed importance on numbers and the measurable, and are blinded by what makes us so human, our relationship to nature, our ties to place and locality, our relationships to each other, our connection to community and culture.
Simply I see the garden as a tool (this word is so…reeks of school/communications-speak) that can help shape, form and supplement all different kinds of learning, those that are tangible and intangible. More so, it facilitates learning in a real life and real time kind of way. The science of plants and ecology are not taught in 30 minute experiments in a sterile environment. Gardens are a terrain full of ‘real world’ experiences, where you can control the environmental setting only so much and have to contend with predictable and unpredictable factors. Children have to anticipate and wait months for a good hearty basil harvest from seed to plant to pesto to mouth. And perhaps contend with extremities such as weather damage, a hungry raccoon or a squirrel that likes to dig out plants or people.
I am only just learning how to begin articulating all that I witness, having only been working in the school garden for one season. I anticipate the upcoming growing season and hope to expand on what I hear, see, feel and experience.