One Health through the Garden
As I mentioned in the rationale at the beginning of this unit, I want my students to take more ownership of the green spaces and resources that already exist at my school. One such space that is currently being underutilized is the garden. I plan to use the garden to facilitate hands-on, project-based learning in this unit. A garden is practical for size in an urban area, and many of the things students learn about the garden can be applied at home in their own plants or garden spaces. Students don’t typically have access to large outdoor spaces in cities, but there are many community gardens in Richmond that students could also apply their knowledge. Place-based planning is important when cities consider traffic flow, parks and recreation spaces, or zoning. It is also very important for effective conservation efforts. Place-based learning would seem to be an important precursor to this kind of planning.
By working in the garden that is outside my classroom window, we will also be able to extend our classroom community to include nature with fidelity and ease of access, which allows me to incorporate this green space more easily across subjects. There is another perspective I considered when deciding the best way for my kindergartners to view and interact with a pollination system. One of my favorite gardener/ writers is Michael Pollan, who writes:
“traditionally, when we have wanted to think about our relationship to nature, we have gone to the wilderness, to places untouched by man… Americans have a deeply ingrained habit of seeing nature and culture as irreconcilably opposed; we automatically assume that whenever one gains, the other must lose… There are many important things about our relationship to nature that cannot be learned in the wild. For one thing, we need, and now more than ever, to learn how to use nature without damaging it.”34
Pollan views the garden as a place where humans are required to being together nature and culture. He argues that gardens are inherently local, and provide important local answers. To problem solve, Pollan states that the gardener has to work with nature if they want a successful yield, so while gardening is inherently anthropocentric, nature must be considered as a vital partner. It is possible to interact with nature without damaging it, and there is power in borrowing methods from nature itself to minimize our damage. Think about it like this—mowing a path through the grass is entirely different from mowing the entire lawn. One is a minor disturbance, while the other destroys thousands of niches within an ecosystem. Making small mindset shifts like this can help us move from individual to collective action. For my classroom, I think part of the move from individual to collective action will come through the sharing of information about and sharing products from our garden with families and school community members. This will be furthered by shared ownership of the space, and through explicit connection to interdisciplinary learning in the classroom.
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