garden-based learning
I’ve been thinking more directly about the connections between this project and a card that my adviser wrote to me last year. He said that I had a deep caring that was tied to the people and things of this world–I’m probably paraphrasing badly, but that was the gist. At the time, I thought that I’m happy that this is the way I presented myself to him, but I didn’t feel that way about myself. But after thinking a little more about it (for like a year), I think he may be right. I’ve been thinking about where this caring for the people and things of this world comes from, and I think it is tied to being connected. Being connected is just another way to talk about love. In this case, the love connects a person to a place. But how to teach this connection to place? It doesn’t seem possible.
But then I was looking at the Tufts Nutrition Program magazine and there was a piece about gardens in public schools. My friend Gwen is getting her teaching degree in Scotland right now, and she wants to come backand plant a garden in our elementary school eventually. Having a garden in a school fosters awareness of where your food is coming from (potentially mitigating the environmental costs of transporting food all over the world), encourages a sense of community within the school, and also instills this connection to place that I think is so important.
Tessa,
You’ve given such a great description of the conundrum about how we encourage a “sense of place” in the efforts to enhance environmental stewardship. You wonder why you are connected and others aren’t but it is clear to me that you have had the privilege of spending many hours “in” the wild and it has become a part of you whereas most of the world’s population doesn’t have the opportunity or time to just “be” surrounded by nature.
What I took from my time studying the issue, the crux is that people only become invested in their relationship to the biota if they can relate to them in their own immediate world. By introducing people to their local neighbors (bugs, frogs, fish, mammals, birds) in an upclose and personal way I’ve seen miraculous changes in their concern for how their actions might impact those other beings around them. Telling people about what is happening in the rain forest or the African desert illicits some sympathy but the real emotional understanding of how each us of has an effect can only happen by illustrating it on a local level. Our job, as environomental educators, is to give each of our students that “ah-ha” moment when they can see themselves as an organism fighting for the same chances as a zooplanker, fish, bird… and with the same set of challenges – where do we get our food, shelter, air, water and how can we send our genes to the next generation? Life is a pretty simple equation if we could just remember that we are just one (albeit overly-powerful) piece of the biotic puzzle.
Keep on trying to make sense of it all. I know there are answers, you young folks just need to keep reminding us.
XOXO
L
Linda I do feel lucky to have instilled in me this connection to place, and I can feel how environmental stewardship grows out of it. I’m glad you introduced that word I think it’s important. I was looking back at something I wrote when I was in China in 2005 about this connection to place. It was apparent to my friend how connected I feel, even though it wasn’t apparent to me. Leticia told me when I brought up the issue of connectedness: You’re like rooted. With iron.
I think the ability to relate that you wrote about is difficult even person-to-person, so for a person to relate to zooplankton is even more difficult. How to show that the zooplankton is facing the same challenges that a person is facing? I feel like it’s impossible to do without anthropomorphizing to a ridiculous degree.