Week 3 - Day 3

 Vivienne:

During our final week of our time in the orchard garden, we have spent our days talking and planning our upcoming workshop. In preparation for this, the group of us had been throwing ideas back and forth at one another and getting glimpses into our own individual approaches to teaching and learning as a result. Group projects are tricky as is and typically undergo a sort of metamorphosis from highschool to university. In highschool, I found my peers and I relished a group project. There was so much comfort to be found in not having to work alone, but instead work collaboratively with one another to create together. However, once I entered university, I found my learning became steadily more and more isolated. Sure, I exchanged ideas with my friends and asked them to glance over my paper when I felt it wasn’t the strongest, but generally, it was me, myself, and my rattling mind. In entering this type of academic isolation, I found myself becoming defensive of my ideas, as if sharing them somehow put me at a disadvantage. As if having something had to always be mine, instead of made better by the input of those around me. 

My knee jerk reaction to a group project is still stress. How will it be organized? Who will do what? What happens if we disagree? What happens if someone doesn’t show up? What happens? However, these past couple weeks with my gardening fellows have challenged my apprehensiveness. In fact, the central idea that I’ve taken from my experience in the B.Ed so far is that learning and teaching doesn’t happen in isolation, nor in the space of defending your ideas like a squirrel hoarding some sort of intellectual acorn. Instead, it happens in the exchange, in the intentional choice of collaboration, of community making, of vulnerability. It’s okay to not know what will happen or who will do what. What’s more important is to begin the sharing and begin the asking. I am made a better teacher by the people around me. This has been true of the wonderful group of women I’ve become close friends with from my cohort who I leaned on during my practicum and this is now true of the folks I have met and grown closer with during our days in the garden. Chris said something about complex root systems and I wish I could remember it exactly but even without the particulars, learning and growing and teaching are all their own systems with their own complexities, and it’s a disservice to imagine that one can do this alone without intertwining and being made stronger with the systems around you (Chris - my sincere apologies if this silly metaphor is absolutely incorrect on a botanical level).

Leo:

Planning this workshop has been an interesting case study in amalgamating multiple unique teaching styles and special interests - poetry, linguistics, planting, harvesting, cooking, sculpture, the act of planning itself - to create a cohesive set of activities. Looking forward to Saturday! Let’s hope the weather’s kind to us.

So - we’re reaching the end of the CFE. A grand time it’s been, weeding, planting, harvesting, up-potting, seeding, writing, singing, watering, irrigating, reading, listening, soundscaping, coding. It’s a good time to reflect on what we’ve learned thus far - about gardens and gardening, our (read: humanity’s, society’s) relationship to the great outdoors, and how school gardens can transform learning. 

What is a garden? Soil and some plants? A front yard? What surrounds the pathways of a public park? The blackberry bushes growing haywire through and over a fence on a road’s edge? That patch of dandelions spreading their roots beneath the leaf-covered grass? The Vancouver School Board would have us believe that what defines a garden is its aesthetic value - whatever we can squeeze out of the outdoors to beautify our schools. The VSB regiments their gardens - measurements and restrictions aplenty until what’s left is a checklist and the constant threat of deinstallation should any part of a garden ever fail to tick a box. Is it worth it? Mayhaps. 

Are gardens aesthetic projects? Are they more? What of the tradition of the Japanese dry garden, made with gravel and rocks and meant only as facsimiles of nature, not as appropriations? Must a garden be productive, give us food? Does a garden fail - or worse, lose its “garden” status - should its crops fail? A school garden is a wonderful idea but there is much to consider - semantically, ontologically, ethically - in the act of cultivating an outdoor space within a human one. Perhaps being hampered by such minute bureaucratic constraints defeats the very purpose of creating an outdoor educational space - that of breaking free of the walled, textbooked traditions of our public education system and transforming learning into a process of listening, breathing, moving, and cultivating. 

Perhaps a garden can be as metaphorical as it is literal. This would mean that a garden can be anything and anywhere. An outdoor classroom is what we make of it - guerrilla warfare against pedagogical orthodoxy - bureaucracy be damned. So tender your garden! Whatever, and wherever, that garden may be…