Day 2 of our CFE!

Hi there––this is Magali Chemali and Lauren Peat writing, two secondary teacher candidates at UBC. Like Amy and Gio, we are also completing our Community Field Experience (CFE) at the Orchard Garden. Magali is both a Science and French teacher, and Lauren teaches English, French, and Humanities. 

First, Magali will explain some of the day’s activities; Lauren will then discuss some ideas that occurred over our lunch break!

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Magali: Today, we got to do ECOPOETRY! If like us you find yourself wondering what kind of French cheese this is, ecopoetry is a little bit like nature poetry, but with a touch of “calling for a change.” And the fun part is that we got to learn and practice this poetry sitting in the morning sun, in the garden, with Jo as a teacher. :) Jo talks to plants (she even spoke to us about a tree alphabet!). She touches them to determine how they feel, and meditates (with a smile) while looking at them. Today we tried Jo’s method and it felt GREAT! First, we had to pick something in the garden we felt close to. Everyone picked a plant or an animal, because, you know, we’re in a garden. But Gio picked the wooden picnic table, because it’s Gio and he knows how to turn anything into a poem. We spent five minutes next to our plant/animal/object, trying to connect. We were then supposed to create a “word bank,” describing it. It did feel to me like this was a one-way relationship… but I ended up with twenty words written down on a piece of paper. The words could be anything, just what was crossing our mind after these intense five minutes with our new friend. Then, the magic of poetry entered the orchard! We wrote an ode to this new friend, an ode that included some of the words we picked. The result was BEAUTIFUL! What a creative bunch of new teachers we have here!

Afterwards, we paired up and played a poetic game… One of us was the gardener, the other a plant in the garden. We imagined how the plant could call out the gardener… This was a really fun creative writing game! Together, we created wonderful poems, which reminded us how powerful collaborative work can be, and that we need to develop more regular opportunities for our students to do this, too.

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Lauren: The ecopoetry workshop was very fruitful (pun intended!), and inspired some great discussion. Over our lunch break, Magali and Gio (both science teachers) raised the difficulty of teaching science from a non-anthropomorphic perspective; that is, a perspective that doesn’t interpret everything through the lens of humankind’s needs and desires. (By way of example, Magali mentioned a former student of hers who was convinced that bee populations were important insofar as they pollinated our food.) It occurred to me, listening to Magali and Gio, that the literary community is wrestling with much the same problem as the scientific community: the near-impossibility of articulating phenomena in a way that does not presume, take liberties, and miss the mark. It is true, as Jo said, that flora and fauna call out to us in myriad ways: for water, for sunlight, for replanting, for care. And yet there is an irresolvable wildness to these animate objects, one cannot be remediated by language, or even attention. As our lunch break came to a close, I think we were left with more questions than answers; although it seems to me to speak to the power of praise and celebration––of revering that which we do not understand.

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We were (happily) too busy writing to take any photos of our ecopoetry workshop, but here are some photos of our post-lunch work party in the garden!

Caelan and Gio proudly displaying their beautiful, home-made trellis! We will soon be training the grape vine around it.

The exquisite Paulownia tomentosa, or "Princess tree." Susan told us that a musician friend of hers sometimes makes handcrafted musical instruments from the wood, because of how quickly the species grows.

Lauren getting her hands dirty in the garden! Boy does it feel good to return to nature after weeks of grading papers...