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Slideshow
Green from the Ground Up
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Green
From the Ground Up
Teaching, Learning and Living with School Gardens
by
Barbara Crane
With chain link fences and asphalt fields, the typical inner-city
schoolyard sets a low standard for the concept of the "natural world." But
that's beginning to change. A mini-revolution bent on greening the places
where California's children spend a major part of their lives is underway,
and a large part of that revolution includes school gardens.
School gardens are springing up in pre-schools to high schools, replacing
pavement in inner cities and being harvested for lunchrooms in suburbia.
They are teaching tools, on the agendas of teachers, parents, community
members, school district administrators and legislators, even, and
especially, in budget-cutting years such as this.
To Julie Korenstein, a 22-year member of the Los Angeles Board of
Education, a garden is "a wonderful addition to a school."
Seventy-eight percent of the Los Angeles Unified School District's
children are at poverty level, she says. "They often live in areas that
are densely populated where there is very little greenery."
Many educators believe that just about all of California's teaching
standards can be taught in a garden - from science and math, to language
arts and history – and a proliferation of teacher's guides and in-service
training supports their efforts. Gardens, they say, are also a place to
learn the "intangibles" that the public expects schools to teach, such as
the value of hard work, teamwork and diligence.
When it comes to ecological awareness, the school garden is a ready-made
classroom. "I don't see how you can teach environmental stewardship unless
you are intimately involved in the environment," says Tim Alderson, chair
of the California School Garden Network (CSGN).
"When you plant a seed and see what the earth will produce, a tangible
connection to the earth is created."
In California, contemporary interest was ignited by Superintendent of
Public Instruction Delaine Easton's advocacy of "a garden in every school"
during the mid-1990s. In Berkeley, the private sector and school district
came together when Alice Waters, the award-winning chef and creator of
Chez Panisse Restaurant, founded the
Edible Schoolyard in 1995. This
transformed a blighted acre of land at Berkeley's Martin Luther King, Jr.
Middle School into an organic garden and kitchen classroom where, 13 years
later, all 950 students prepare, eat-and enjoy-the fruits and vegetables
they grow.
Uniting Behind School Gardens
About a decade ago, industry trade groups and nonprofit gardening and
agriculture associations joined several California universities and state
government entities to form the California School Garden Network. CSGN's
goal echoes Easton's: to provide a school garden in every school in the
state.
The network's efforts paid off in 2006 with passage of the
California Instructional School Garden Program
(AB 1535), allocating $15 million for grants to begin or expand
instruction using a school garden as a learning tool.
"Nearly $11 million was awarded to the schools that applied," says Deborah
Beall, who is in charge of the program for the California Department of
Education. "Unfortunately, the remainder was cut from the program in a
round of state budget reductions. The success story is that 3,848 school
gardens have been funded. We estimate that almost half of all California
schools have an instructional school garden."
The Instructional School Garden Program was funded for three years and
will end in June 2009 unless additional funding is found. Nevertheless,
the legislation "helped the school garden movement in California
enormously," says Alderson. "In addition to the obvious way, which was to
fund school gardens, we began to get awareness above the classroom level.
School board members and school administrators began to see the school
garden as another kind of classroom."
That was the case at the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD).
Board Members Julie Korenstein and Marlene Kanter presented a resolution
which encouraged the district to preserve existing school gardens,
facilitate the development of a garden in every school and foster links
between the gardens and the community. "The resolution let the local
schools know that the board was behind them and behind the concept of
instructional school gardens," Korenstein says.
Tonya Mandl, a teacher and adviser for the California Department of Public
Health nutrition program, was tapped to write LAUSD's grant proposal for
its instructional school garden program. The district received $1.72
million dollars and involved all 526 of the district's early education,
elementary, middle and secondary schools.
The variety of school gardens found in the LAUSD includes edible
nutritional gardens, where food is grown, eaten by students or sold for
fundraising at farmer's markets; literacy gardens outside school libraries
or classrooms, where students enjoy a pleasant environment when reading;
aesthetic ornamental gardens; native California gardens used to teach
history or conservation and even just a few planted containers outside a
classroom.
Benefits at Every Grade Level
In whatever form they take, school gardens appear to promote learning at
every grade level, according to both anecdotal reports and formal studies.
Preschoolers at Brooklyn Early Education Center in East Los Angeles stop
at their garden every morning before school. They look for bugs or chase
Mr. Fluffy, a white rabbit, along the paths.
"They're developing the socialization skills that make it easier to learn
when they go to elementary school," says Dwayne Sherman, the teacher who
started the garden and has nurtured it during his decade at the school.
"This past June, when the children went to the elementary school for
orientation, awards for the month were posted in the corridor," he says.
"The beautiful thing is that out of the ten awards displayed, seven went
to kids who came out of our early education center."
Numerous studies indicate that experiential
learning can lead to significantly higher gains in science achievement
than classroom learning. At Carthay Center Elementary School's "Garden of
Possibilities," master gardener volunteer Herb Machleder
devised a fourth grade lesson
on electrical circuits and magnetism. He used simple household
materials to build a circuit to control the garden's drip irrigation
system. (See related story.)
"The kids had a lot of fun. They were opening and closing the circuit and
spraying each other on a hot day. It was hands-on science," says Dahl. At
the same time, the children learned a fourth grade
science standard, which requires them to understand how a simple electric
circuit works.
Middle schools present one of the most challenging age groups for many
teachers, says Jesus Soto, a garden coordinator based at
Hollenbeck Middle School, a
Title 1 school near downtown Los Angeles.
He tells stories about taking a misbehaving student to the garden.
Teachers warned him to stay vigilant, to watch the student carefully if he
was using a tool. But on the contrary, the student has been able to relax
in the outdoor environment and has become one of Soto's hardest workers.
"I think that everyone has their own natural environment," says Soto, "and
some students really like being outside." Studies support Soto's
observation, showing that gardens create a positive learning environment
and fewer discipline problems. For examples click
here and
here.
For many students at
Venice High School, "the garden is their
first opportunity to eat fresh food and gain the awareness that food comes
from the soil," says David King, garden master at the school's Learning
Garden.
Some go the first time grumbling about getting their tennis shoes dirty,
he says. A month later, when the first radish comes in, they come walking
out of the garden in a statue of liberty pose, holding their radishes
aloft. Beyond the excitement, "participating in planning and caring for
plants has as much of an effect on a person as caring for another person
or an animal. You have to learn to pay attention," a valuable lesson at
the multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-demographic high school, King says.
"How Can You Have a Green School Without a Garden?"
Mud Baron is LAUSD school garden specialist. He feels that the benefit of
a school garden extends beyond its greenness to the whole meaning of what
students have to learn at school. He says, "the garden grounds the kids,
quite literally."
Hired with AB 1535 funds, Baron promotes the school garden program to
principals and administrators and helps teachers and volunteers locate the
resources-soil, plants, tools and irrigation, funding-they need to start
or maintain a garden. He achieved minor celebrity at last year's
Green California Schools Summit when he
questioned an audience of architects, school district administrators and
government representatives engaged in green school building, "How can you
have a green school without a garden?"
His query was answered when the Collaboration for High Performance Schools
(CHPS)
criteria, California's green school rating system, was changed to include
the addition one point for the presence of a school garden, effective in
2009. Approximately 25 projects in LAUSD's $11.8 billion new school
building program, in which all new schools are green schools, are in late
design stages. The district is currently developing standards for
architects to follow and will modify designs to include school gardens.
"School gardens need community involvement to thrive. That includes
parents, teachers, administration and the local community," says Nat
Zappia, executive director of the
Garden School Foundation, which is
dedicated to building gardens in LAUSD elementary schools. Teresa Dahl was
successful in gathering several hundred volunteers to create the Garden of
Possibilities at Carthay Elementary School in Los Angeles.
The Learning Garden at Venice High School offers yoga and tai-chi classes
in the garden and encourages community work parties. The garden plan for
Canoga Park High School was developed by the
West
Valley Occupational Center, a career technical education center
open to the community. It includes plans for an amphitheatre to bring the
wider community into the garden. For a video of the Canoga High garden,
click
here.
As ecological and healthy food awareness grows, the growth of the school
garden revolution seems assured, especially when communities get involved.
"It's our obligation to teach the kids how to make the planet safe for the
next generations," says Pamela Hamashita, principal of Canoga Park High
School.
"They're going to have to learn a new lifestyle, one that doesn't destroy
the environment. The garden is a good place to learn these lessons."
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