Our First Day in the Garden!

 Hello! 

    Our names are Nathan and Alex. We want to start our blog post by acknowledging that we are on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people whose land we are grateful to work, learn and play on. As members of the Education for Sustainability cohort, we are excited for the opportunity to continue building on our understanding of place-based and land-based education and delving further into our knowledge of the systems we belong to. Our goal over the next few weeks is to explore and reflect on what it means to be beginning teachers who leverage place as a powerful tool for learning. 

For the first part of our blog post, we wanted to summarize what we did today! We began our day with introductions meeting our fellow CFE teacher candidates and it was so lovely to hear how everyone’s practicum went. We were then given a tour of the garden space by Chris, our ‘Guardian of the Garden’. Next, we discussed the ‘why’ behind teaching in a garden and the potential challenges we might face in doing so. We took a quick lunch break and ventured over to the UBC Greenhouse to grab some tomato plants and met two adorable greenhouse kitties as well. 

We ended our day with a garden work party and got our hands into the soil weeding, prepping garden beds, and planting zucchini. We also struggled to help our tomato friends stand up and get ready to be transplanted since they were very top-heavy and needed some support (although, don’t we all). As Amelia put it, “the stakes had never been higher!” 

We wanted to close off our first post by sharing some of our big takeaways from today as beginning teachers. We recognize the numerous ways in which social-emotional learning (SEL) can be integrated into garden teaching. Today we utilized the calm atmosphere of the garden to reflect on the benefits and challenges of teaching in the garden. We discussed how the teaching in the garden can encourage personal responsibility and environmental stewardship as well as respect for land. It can also be a place of inclusion where the needs of diverse learners may be met more completely than in the classroom alone. Finally, we acknowledged the various ways in which gardens can be used to teach cross-curricularly. For example, we might discuss measurement with students in terms of the square footage of the garden beds. We could explore geometry by investigating naturally-occuring shapes and patterns in the garden. We might also consider art education by utilizing the various colours of plants in the space. All three of those content/subject areas could be integrated into one cross-curricular lesson! 

By reflecting today, we realize that opportunities for learning and teaching in the garden are endless! Over the next few weeks, we hope to expand our garden pedagogies and dive deeper into the world of teaching with the garden as our co-teacher. 

See you all next Monday!