Presentation by: John Bruyere, Amy Flett, Christopher Rich, Elizabeth Beattie, Stacy Friedman, Sandra Scott, Douglas Adler
Session: C | Time: 10:05AM – 10:45AM | Location: Room 201
Gardens are becoming an increasingly important and meaningful school experience for many children, teachers, and neighbourhood communities as they provide a space for “educating to feed ourselves” (Tsepa, 2009) and opportunities to explore, wonder about, and love nature. As practising teachers, we have all directly experienced the value, pleasure, and pure joy of taking students outside. Our own outdoor experiences as students with the HOPE cohort included excursions to campus places including the UBC Farm Children’s Garden. Inspired by coursework in outdoor and environmental education, we were motivated to create similar opportunities for our students. We wanted to develop garden places for school and neighbourhood communities. We envisioned a welcoming space where living and non living, human and more than human made corporeal, spiritual, and cosmological connections, an “ecocentric intercorporeality” guided by slow pedagogy (Payne & Wattchow, 2009). The garden would be a place to share stories and experiences which foster an ethic of care for the Earth through ways of knowing that embrace Respect, Reciprocity, Relatedness, Responsibility (Archibald, 2008) and Rootedness (Scott, 2016). To realize our dream, we pursued a directed studies at the UBC Farm Children’s Garden alongside mentors from the Landed Learning Programme. As a Community of Learners, we engaged in a collaborative Inquiry and experienced the creation of a school garden from theory to practice, from seed to salad. In this presentation, we will share our “noticings and wonderings” (Duckworth, 2006) as we lived the naissance of a school garden within the environs of the UBC Farm and Pacific Spirit Park, as visitors to these unceded traditional Lands of the Musqueam people. Our stories are informed by our roles as reflective practitioners (Schön, 1983) and practitioner inquirers (Cochrane-Smith & Lytle, 2009). We tell these narratives through an eco-pedagogy lens. Learning in nature and learning from nature; Nature as Master Teacher (Payne & Wattchow, 2009). As Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) writes in her book, our course text, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Knowledge, Scientific Wisdom, and the Teachings of Plants, “The Land is the real teacher. All we need as students is mindfulness (p. 247)”.
Abstract: 582