Gardens, Systems, and the Sustainability Stool

"From the garden, and the kitchen, and the table, you learn empathy--for each other and for all of creation; you learn compassion; and you learn patience and self-discipline. A curriculum that teaches these lessons gives children an orientation to the future--it can give them hope."

-Alice Waters

I haven't visited that quote in awhile. But it speaks so beautifully to what I believe our children need with them when they enter adulthood: empathy and hope.  And it outlines a way to offer those things to our kids while challenging them with rigorous academics.  It's been a decade since I began studying sustainability education and got hooked on school gardens. It seems about time to go back to the basics: What is so great about school gardens anyway? Why is the garden, the kitchen, and the table important in education? I write this post for those unfamiliar with school gardens and all their merits, and for those (like me) who've been doing this school garden thing awhile and could benefit from re-articulating the rationale for our work.

When thinking about the why's of school gardening, if you go at it long enough, you'll probably get back to the most basic education question of all--what is education for? The answers are myriad. Some want to reform the system to empower oppressed peoples, some see the preservation of nature as paramount, some want to make sure our country can compete in the global economy. I'd say all three can be justified. Of course race, class, and gender issues must be addressed in order to ensure equality in education. But what good are we doing if we do not also address the environmental legacy students will inherit? And every last one of us wants our children to be able to make a decent living  when they're grown and share this planet with 8 or 9 billion other humans. 

I've been school gardening long enough that I can say without doubt, that a good garden program can integrate these most basic why's of education. Today, when people talk about sustainability education (of which school gardens are part), many folks include all 3 "legs of the sustainability stool": social systems, ecosystems, and economic systems. School gardens can be a model of sustainability education when they integrate social, ecological, and economic concerns; teach systems thinking; promote dialogue and build community; and empower students to believe in their ability to make changes in the world.

Schools, Gardens, and the Sustainability Stool

If a school garden program includes growing food crops, or even composting from food scraps, the idea of food systems will likely enter the classroom. To understand a food system, you really do have to think about ecosystems, economic systems, and the individual people affected by all our food choices each day. A young elementary gardener may only go as far as understanding that a garden represents an ecosystem, that people, bugs, and weather can all impact that system, and that food costs less when you grow it yourself. But that lays the foundation for a middle schooler to learn about greater complexity within their food system--for example, dialoging about the environmental, health, and economic trade-offs when choosing conventional vs. organic food, or examining the factors contributing to childhood obesity (from food marketing policy to poverty and food access). All the examples above also tie right in to the core curriculum already taught in the classroom--science, math, civics, it goes on and on. School gardens open a door for creative schools to weave the threads of sustainability into the fabric of the existing curriculum.

Systems Thinking

Growing food and creating habitat through school gardening incubates holistic thinking, the ability to examine social and environemtal systems at the same time, the ability to think systemically. Fritjof Capra, founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy, speaks to this idea:

At the Center for Ecoliteracy, we have experienced that growing a school garden and using it as a resource for cooking school meals is an ideal project for experiencing systems thinking and the principles of ecology in action, and for integrating the curriculum. Gardening reconnects children to the fundamental of food--indeed, to the fundamentals of life--while integrating and enlivening virtually every activity that takes place at a school. 

In the garden, we learn about food cycles and we integrate the natural food cycles into our cycles of planting, growing, harvesting, composting, and recycling. Through this practice, we also learn that the garden as a whole is embedded in larger systems that are again living networks with their own cycles. The food cycles intersect with these larger cycles--the water cycle, the cycle of the seasons, and son on--all of which are linked in the planetary web of life. (Creativity and Leadership in Learning Communities, 1999 p. 7). 

Our world is made up of all kinds of systems, from natural life systems to human-designed systems like communications networks or cities. By grounding students in the understanding of a concrete, defined system like a garden or a compost bin, we prepare them to understand patterns, connections, and feedback loops in increasingly complex, abstract systems they will need to be comfortable with to be good problem-solvers in a global economy. 

Dialogue and Community Building
Gardens make room for conversations. In a garden setting, students naturally talk to and collaborate with one another. They get to know one another, they develop relationships. And relationships are the core strength of a community. Gardening can also be hard work, and gardening in groups builds a sense of community through shared accomplishment. A strong classroom community is beneficial in part because it gives children a sense of belonging, it makes them feel safe--and in order for learning to occur at the optimal level, a child has to feel safe, both physically and emotionally. 

But the community-building doesn't just occur at the classroom level. A school garden brings adults together as well. School garden programs frequently host community work days, and I have seen the magic of these many times. Hands down, I'd rather work in a garden with total strangers than attend a cocktail party with them. In a garden, we are given tasks alongside which conversations naturally spring up. At a dinner party, there are awkward silences! Additionally, a community garden connects people from all walks of life (rich, poor, liberal, conservative, protestant, pagan, black, brown, or white), and helps broaden our mental picture of who's a part of our community. And that, very simply and naturally, is transformative.   

Empowerment

Sustainability. A big word, a stool that has to hold a lot of weight. A heavy burden on our children, who know a lot about the world's complex problems at a young age. How can we ease their burden a little bit? By showing them how to make positive changes in their corner of the world, and gardening can do this in spades. 

As kids develop, their understanding of and feelings of connection to the world expand outward. In elementary school, kids' concrete thinking and very localized sense of community dovetails wonderfully with a garden on the school grounds. Young children experience that their actions matter when they grow food for themselves, their school, or their community. The students in Southern Boone schools love the Learning Garden, and they feel proud of helping to maintain a space that is changing their town and school for the better. And this past spring, when the student farmers' market booth brought in over $500 that will help sustain the garden program, you bet those elementary students felt full of enthusiasm and hope. 

As kids mature, their ability to act within a larger or more complex system grows. Middle school students can start to understand the food system in which their school operates. Perhaps they grow a garden, but maybe they participate in Farm to School or learn how to advocate for healthier food options in their community. High schoolers could run a business, write grants, do significant research--so many ways connected to gardens, food systems, and schools for students to practice positive community impact. And it's through acting in the world that humans, children as well as adults, come to believe in our remarkable power to create positive change. And how wonderful that this transformative empowerment can begin with the simple act of planting a seed.