Anthropology News April 2008

IN FOCUS

School Garden Pedagogies

Understanding Childhood Landscapes
REBECCA ZArGEr U SOuTH FLOrIDA Over the last decade, there has been renewed interest in the role that experiences in nature play in childrens development and health, and many researchers and journalists have expressed concerns that US children arent spending enough time outside. Some claim that todays children and youth may suffer from what Richard Louv termed nature deficit disorder. Framing humanenvironment relationships as a disorder is problematic at best, but does suggest a pattern in the ways childhood interactions with the nonhuman world are being constructed in North America and beyond. Childrens environments, natural and otherwise, fundamentally shape their everyday lives. Establishing gardens in schools and integrating them within curricula is one proposed solution to this perceived problem. With everyone from David Orr to Alice Waters extolling the virtues of environmental education through school gardens, what perspectives can anthropology of childhood and environmental anthropology bring to this debate? Gardens as Outdoor Classrooms Experiential science learning during childhood is thought to foster environmental stewardship. School gardens are one locus for a pedagogical approach to science and environmental education that has gained momentum in the US and internationally. Thousands of schools have established garden plots and are integrating them into standard curricula. Gardenbased learning provides children and youth with a space for science experiments, with history, literature, arts and social studies often incorporated as well. The shared wisdom is that school gardens offer a variety of benefits to children and youth: marketing fresh fruits and vegetables to an increasingly unfit young population, thereby improving nutrition; improving environmental awareness, self-esteem, academic achievement, teacher job satisfaction and studentteacher relationships; and cultivating a sense of wonder for the workings of the natural world. Outdoor classrooms can bring knowledge and skills of local community members, particularly elders or master gardeners, into a formal school setting. If watching as children erupt in excitement when they harvest food they planted is not convincing enough, research in science and agricultural education in a diversity of school settings suggests that many children respond in positive ways to school garden experiences. However, many educators are uncertain as to how to create gardening curricula that meet these various goals, as well as state-level standardized testing and federal No Child Left Behind criteria, to ensure program funding. Recent studies of school gardening illustrate the challenges that researchers, administrators, school districts, teachers and parents face in creating, implementing and maintaining school gardens, particularly with uneven allocation of resources across schools and communities. Insights from ethnographies of childhood, children and youth, dren learn from their peers as they gain skills through hands-on experiences of pushing seeds into the soil and watching the results of their efforts develop and grow. School gardens are productive sites for research on childrens emergent botanies (as Cindi Katz refers to them) and on processes of life. Some researchers even claim that gardening reduces the symptoms of ADHD. Evaluating these claims through ethnographic research guided by children as well as parents and educators would allow for a more nuanced understanding of the pedagogical value of school gardens and their impacts

C O M M E N tar Y developing knowledge, skills and expertise with local flora during childhood. Typically research in agriculture science and environmental education incorporates structured interviews or written surveys with children, educators and parents. Augmenting these with ethnographic approaches to information collectionincluding visual methods such as photo elicitation, giving children cameras to capture their experiences and analyzing childrens maps, drawings and journalsdeepens what we know about school gardens as alternatives to classroom based learning. on childrens environmental perceptions, knowledge and skills. Gardening and horticulture provide for teachers an interactive, experiential space to explore the intersections between people and nature, to communicate how fundamental domestication and cultivation are to human history and how human activities have modified Earths landscapes over long periods of time. Garden-based learning might focus on how control over access to resources, whether shaped by gender, age, ethnicity or social status, affects which plants are cultivated and who benefits. Curricula can be designed to give young people the opportunity to explore not just plant biology, but also cultural landscapes. For example, learning how heirloom vegetable varieties embody particular heritages and meanings, by hearing stories from seed collectors, allows local experts to share their knowledge with younger generations. Other possibilities include using gardens as spaces to discuss how the boundary between wild and domesticated is socially constructed, or the consequences of individual agency and collective action in response to environmental challenges. Tampa Bay Area Garden Research Project An interdisciplinary research group at my university has been involved in studying the process, pedagogy and impacts of school gardening in the Tampa Bay area over the last two years. The aims of the projecta collaboration between our team, a local public chartered primary school and a campus research center focused on children and familiesare to better understand current pedagogies of school gardens and how gardenbased learning affects children, parents and teachers. Initial ethno-

Children at Learning Gate school constructed scarecrows in the organic school garden to protect young watermelon vines. Photo courtesy Laurel Graham

and on childrens learning in outof-school settings have the potential to influence curricular agendas. Studies on the impacts of school gardening often focus on teachers and parents, or improving assessment for the purpose of meeting science education curricula standards in North America or Europe. Fewer studies have explored childrens perceptions of gardens as pedagogical spaces, or how chil-

Gardens as Natural Spaces There is little critical examination of the view of gardens as natural spaces assumed to be inherently beneficial to children and educators. Time spent in gardens, whether planting seedlings or observing as butterflies harvest nectar, is thought to nourish healthy minds and bodies, green the school grounds and encourage environmentallyconscious decision-making later in

IN FOCUS

April 2008 Anthropology News

graphic interviews documented the exchange of knowledge and skills between teachers and children, and also the ways children share what they learn with their parents, shaping household food choices. In this way, the focus is on children as agents in their own and their families daily lives, contextualized by parental expectations and school curricula that influence what and how children learn about their local environment through gardening. Soon, the collaborative will be hosting the first of two educator workshops on school gardening pedagogy. The workshops provide an opportunity to interview teachers about their experiences and a way to link them with university and community actors to create a network of professionals interested in school gardens as spaces for creating new models of teaching and learning. The forthcoming Tampa Bay School Garden Network (www.TampaBaySGN.org) is an interactive portal for sharing curricula, funding sources and logistical and personal support. We are

developing curricula that incorporate local cultural landscapes, nutrition, historical ecology and human dimensions of regional environmental problems, such as water scarcity. School Gardens in Historical Context Though school gardening has recently received a flurry of attention in North America, incorporating gardens into schooling is not a new concept. In the US and Europe, school gardens were popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. US school gardens grew in popularity leading up to World War I, briefly resurged during World War II, then waned until the post-Earth Day Vietnam War era in the 1970s. They decreased in popularity though the 1980s but over the last decade have experienced a resurgence. Outside the US, programs that promoted school-based agriculture have flourished at different moments in the development of colonial and post-colonial education systems. In

Belize, for example, in response to mid-twentieth century agricultural development goals, an educational program called REAP was established throughout the country to encourage more young Belizeans to expand small scale horticulture instead of purchasing imported foods. Like many interventions, the program ultimately failed for a complex of reasons including lack of continued funding. Decades later, in the southernmost district of Belize, another school garden program has been established in the wake of a small but severe hurricane in 2001 to provide additional vegetables to schools and families in affected communities. Critically examining how particular pedagogical frames, such as school gardening in the US and Belize, relate to broader political and ecological processes could provide insight into todays claims about what is best for children in differing educational and cultural contexts. In the contemporary US, given the recent upswing in publicly

consumed environmental consciousness from media conglomerates briefly changing the color of their icons to green, to corporate greenwashing and the locavore movementproponents of school gardens may be in a position to argue for more support from state governments or county school boards. Are school gardens promising sites for actively engaged learning? We can start by asking children, parents and teachers what they think. Rebecca Zarger is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida. The project described here is supported by the USF Collaborative for Children and Families, in conjunction with partner Learning Gate School and USF faculty Laurel Graham, Elaine Howes, Jennifer Friedman and undergraduate anthropology honors student Kristen Dale. Thanks to Jennifer Hunsecker and Doug Reeser who shared insights from their research.

Recent Developments in the Anthropology of Childhood

DAVID F LANCY UTAH STATE U The focus on children in this issue of AN reflects an efflorescence of child-related work within anthropology. What follows is a brief accounting of these activities. Publications The June 2007 issue of American Anthropologist included a special In Focus section on Children, Childhoods and Childhood Studies. Edited by Jill Korbin (Case Western Reserve U) and Myra BluebondLangner (Rutgers U-Camden), the issue included six wide-ranging articles. Jill and Myra have both been instrumental in establishing childhood studies programs at their institutions (http://case.edu/ artsci/childstudies and http://children.camden.rutgers.edu). Myra is also the editor of the new multidisciplinary book series in childhood studies from Rutgers University Press, which has long published works on the anthropology of children and youth. Other important and relatively new publishing outlets for anthropological studies of childhood include the journals Children & Society (Blackwell), Human Nature (Springer) and Childhood (Sage). This year Wiley-Blackwell and Cambridge University Press will both publish comprehensive surveys of the field authored by Heather K Montgomery and David F Lancy, respectively. Conferences and Meetings There has been a steady stream of symposia dedicated to topics that fall at the intersection of anthropology and childhood. One session at the AAA meeting in Washington DC emphasized the value of a four-field perspective. Titled Convening a Summit of Anthropologists Studying Childhood: Just Like Children, We Can Learn to Get Along, the session attracted a very large and enthusiastic audience. At the joint Society for Cross-Cultural Research and Society for Anthropology Sciences meetings in New Orleans in February there were several relevant panels, including The Elastic Nature of Childhood. The Society for Psychological Anthropology is sponsoring a conference this summer titled Re-staging Childhood, where scholars will present and discuss work related to the creation of periods or stages in the lives of children and the transitions that mark passage from one to the next. In June, Rutgers and Drexel universities are sponsoring the conference Emerging Perspectives on Children in Migratory Circumstances (http://globalchild.rutgers.edu). In July, the Centre for the Study of Childhood and Youth at the University of Sheffield will sponsor its second international conference (www.sheffield.ac.uk/cscy). Interest Group Also at the 2007 AAA meetings, the Anthropology of Childhood Interest Group held a well-attended inaugural meeting. This Special Interest Group was initiated by Kristen Cheney (cheneyke@notes. udayton.edu) and Susan Shepler (shepler@american.edu), and their efforts resulted in over 200 individuals electing to join, more than enough to achieve AAAs official blessing. The interest group can be accessed via the listserv ACIG-L@listserv.american.edu. If you would like to be included, please convey your interest to Kristen or Susan. All of these announcementsand much, much morecan be found at http://anthropologyofchildhood.usu.edu. You are invited to submit contributions, including course syllabi, news items and photos, to David Lancy (david.lancy@usu.edu).