Changing the composition of the soil: helping students see connections and possibilities through gardening, making and social activism

We have two aspects to our adult lives: our vocation and our advocation. The former pays for life, the latter makes it all worth it. Education, with vision and purpose, makes both possible.

I garden to feed my soul.  The fact that I also can feed my belly is an added perk.  Like all of those who put seed into soil, I find something utterly rewarding in watching my efforts come to fruition.  And, as a teacher, gardening seems to be an apt metaphor for so much that we do as as a recent #TEDEdChat on Ron Findley's Ted Talk  revealed.  I don't want to rehash every metaphor we explored, but I do want to speak towards the very powerful metaphor found in Findley's talk A guerilla gardener in South Central LA and how it relates to a fundamental purpose of education: helping students learn the skills and mindsets that will enable them to productively and meaningfully contribute to the communities they live in.

In his talk, Findley reveals how "I have witnessed my garden become a tool for the education, a tool for the transformation of my neighbourhood. To change the community, you have to change the composition of the soil. We are the soil." How can we as teachers change the composition of the soil so that we have fertile ground for life?  Let me suggest 5 ways:

1.  Eradicate poverty by ensuring the education that every student, in every school around the world, gets will enable them to be meaningfully employed for life:  Once again, developing strong skills in literacy, numeracy, science, and the social sciences probably is the best way to ensure that students have the basic skills and the learning skills needed for post-secondary (and I don't just mean university).

2. Create the kinds of lessons, units, and programs (hopefully interdisciplinary in nature) that give students the ability to solve novel, authentic, real-world, real-life problems using the skills they have acquired in all their courses.

3. Let them make mistakes, but ensure that you provide them with the supports to learn from their mistakes. If you want to change the composition of the soil, students are going to need grit.

4. Let them learn how to make something.  What is wrong with students knowing how to do an oil change, build something, cook something, sew something, fix something, create something?  The Maker movement speaks to something almost primal in our pyscholological make-up. The skills students learn in these environments just might be the avocation that gives purpose, excitement and flow to their lives for years and decades to come.

5.  Playtime.  Have as many different kinds of clubs and extra-curricular programs as possible in school.  Sports are vital, but, so is the crochet club, the manga club, the take-it-apart-and-put-it-back-together club. Even in high school, we need to help students learn to create balance in their lives.  Students with avocations are more likely to develop the skills that help them stick it out in their vocations.

So.  I have just given myself work for life!  Over the next year, I want to explore how I can help my students improve or optimize the composition of their soil.  And I don't think that academics is the only way.  I have spent more than half of my career in schools were many of my students will not go to university and will not have white-collar jobs. They will work with their hands and be active participants in society.  They raise families and pay their taxes.  But I am also very mindful that the last 10 years in North America has clearly highlighted how both these white-collar and blue-collar jobs that were once deemed life-time vocations are not as secure as they once were.  So, this brings me to my next point.

Education today must give our students the ability to be life-long learners with one more spectacularly important skill: the ability to see connections and possibilities that do not seem to exist.  And that is were I think we need to focus far more upon the connections between the disciplines; upon the fact that in life, rarely do you just use one skill to solve a problem.

I'm a big fan of Gever Tully and his Tinkering School: Life lessons from tinkering and 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do.  Gever Tully thinks that we need to let kids just get dirty and make things.  In doing so, they learn a lot, make many, many mistakes, probably cut themselves, and use skills from all of the disciplines to solve problems.  As a mother, watching my young children do this daily in our backyard, I'm scared silly, but it also fills me with awe. Children are natural makers and problem solvers and, when we cut up learning into isolated disciplines, we slowly kill that innate ability.

So out of all of these observations and ideas, I have a suggestion for a interdisciplinary, inquiry, project-based unit centred around the idea of gardening using Findley's notion that gardening is all about changing the "composition of the soil" and Tully's idea that there are  "simple things that we can do to raise our kids to be creative, confident and in control of the environment around them".

I'm going to call it "Life Gardening" (hopefully my students can come up with a much more inspiring and hip name) and I want to use it with our grade 7s.  We recently received a grant from the BP A+ For Energy program  http://www.bp.com/en/global/aplus-for-energy.html that will enable our school to build a greenhouse.  Initially, the grant was for grade 7 science and in particular for a single unit "Plants for Food and Fibre",  but I see the potential for something much bigger within that grade.

I'm toying with using Ron Findley's talk as the central text and then bring in math, science, language arts, social studies, food studies, art and music to create a 6-8 week learning experience that will not only help students master the skills and knowledge of grade 7 science, but, more importantly, help them make connections within all of their classes.  We might end up growing the plants that the First Nations people were cultivating in pre-colonial times here in Canada,  or honing our informational text skills by researching and reading about gardening, or donating our produce to the homeless at our local drop-in centre, or holding a fundraiser for materials to continue once the funds from the grant are used up,  or becoming politically engaged so that our environment can continue to sustain and feed all of the citizens of our planet,  but those are all big steps in making Grade 7 Social Studies, Language Arts, Math and  Science more relevant and real to a group of students who might, otherwise,  not be able to see the connections between those disciplines; who otherwise, might not be able to see early enough that all of life is connected in some meaningful and compelling way.

And, hopefully, in the end, the final result will be a dedicated and devoted group of kids who grow up to not only be avid gardeners,  with meaningful and productive careers in related fields, but adults with an advocation and passion for social justice that was ignited by the lessons they learned this year in a small greenhouse on the playground.

Talk about planting the seeds for the future; talk about changing the composition of the soil.

Come, let's revision our pedagogical practice together.