LIVING SOIL AND COMPOSTING:


LIFE’S LESSONS IN LEARNING GARDENS


by Dilafruz Williams and Jonathan Brown, Portland State University


T


his journal entry conveys an eight year old student’s understanding of the web of life: how to use natural fertilizer, ways to warm the soil to create favorable conditions for plant growth, and the role of beneficial


insects in a school garden. Beyond distant field trips, learning gardens provide a locally relevant context for such multi-faceted environmental discovery right on the school grounds where learning is housed; they bring children into contact with a vast biological and cultural web of relations embodied in the living soil of compost. We celebrate learning gardens as sites for integrated learn- ing that can help students develop an intimate connection with land, insects, plants, and soil through awakening their curiosity, wonder, and critical thinking skills. Life is about more than head and gut; our fingernails, skins, palates, nostrils, and tongues are also important in nurturing deep and long lasting bonds of en- vironmental kinship. In this essay we highlight compost-making as a practical school garden activity that builds living soil and serves as a metaphorical guide for learning about life.


Where is the Learning in Learning Gardens? On March 20, 2009, First Lady Michelle Obama joined


children from a local public school to break ground on the South Lawn of the White House, establishing an organic vegetable garden with special attention to health and nutrition. In doing so, she has validated the recent surge in the school gardening movement. Simultaneously, garden-based learning is being sup- ported by state and local curricular efforts to align standards and to provide design support.1 An avenue of environmental education, school gardens


are unique as they are located directly on school grounds. This makes for dynamic learning as “the environment” can less eas- ily be separated from daily human activity. Walking through gardens on the way to and from school encourages students to develop a sense of ownership, to connect with the natural world, and to observe subtle seasonal changes, as the opening journal excerpt demonstrates.


Both of us have been involved in the design and devel-


After we spread the chicken poop, we covered it with hay… the poop was the fertilizer and the hay was the stuff that kept the plants warm. After school I checked the garden. Empty. Nobody. I climbed the fence to check the radishes [I had planted.] I dug around the radishes. They seemed dead. I grabbed a magnifying glass and looked closely at the leaves. Aphids were chewing on the leaves, like ants or other bugs. I went home worried.


Next day [I went to check the garden.] Something red flashed in my eye. I panicked. “Yhaaaa!” I screamed with terror. I looked down expecting to see some poisonous bug. It was a pair of lady- bugs, maybe mating. The answer to the radish problem right in front of my face!


-3rd Page 40 grade student journal (from Clarke, 2010)


opment of gardens on school sites and have partnered with teachers, and students of varying ages, to support their learning. Garden-based learning is considered an instructional strategy that utilizes a garden as an instructional resource, a teaching tool that encompasses programs, activities and projects in which the garden is the foundation for integrated learning, in and across disciplines, through active, engaging real-world experiences. In some settings it is the educational curriculum and in others it supports or enriches the curriculum (Desmond et al., 2002, p.7). The resurgence of school gardens and garden-based learn-


ing across the country in school districts large and small appears to have multiple purposes and outcomes: aesthetics, growing food, developing healthy eating habits, rain-water harvesting, interdisciplinary learning, social development, multisensory learning, play, academic learning (particularly science), instilling morals, intergenerational learning, healthy habits, and physical activity (Williams & Dixon, forthcoming). Multicultural gar- dens have been successfully used as context for teaching about regional cultural history (Kiefer & Kemple, 1998) as well as


www.clearingmagazine.org/online CLEARING 2010


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