CFE Day 4

  This is Caelan and Lexie here, sharing a bit about our action packed day at the Orchard Garden CFE. We were lucky to have such beautiful weather while we were busy exploring Nitobe Garden, planting tomatoes and painting signs for the Orchard Garden. 

A picture of Nitobe Garden that Lexi captured on this beautiful morning.

We started our day at Nitobe Garden, where PhD candidate Tsubasa guided us through a tour of the garden. Following the week of perceiving gardens as a place to cultivate plants with a purpose, we were impressed with the Japanese gardening philosophy that a garden is a work of art that reflects one’s walk through life. 

Lexi standing in front of the “Father Lantern” in Nitobe Garden.

The first portion of the garden we walked through was an impression of childhood. The plants and fixtures in this section are very tall, meant to make the people walking through feel small by comparison. Following a very large stone lantern built to memorialize Dr. Inazō Nitobe, who the garden commemorates, is a fork in the path. Walking straight one traverses a flat bridge surrounded by greenery, but taking the “harder path” leads the onlooker over stone steps next to a scenic waterfall. The garden tells us that taking the riskier or more complicated path can have a beautiful reward. 

When the paths converged we came across what was Lexie’s favourite view in the garden…

The trees get shorter as we enter the “teenage” part of the garden where soon we come to another diverted path. On the left is the “bridge of early marriage” and next to it is a bridge representing getting married later in life. These bridges follow a Japanese belief that demons can only walk in straight lines. The bridge of early marriage is straight meaning that if one isn’t prepared for this decision, you may be bringing demons along with you. The second marriage bridge is structured diagonally so the demons cannot follow into that relationship. We were all impressed by how much symbolism the garden contains! We found ourselves in conversations about philosophy and life as we continued through the garden.

The rightmost tine of the fork goes to a dead end, representing the errors that we make when we are young, but that it is possible to turn around and choose a better path. 

The last part of the garden is where we find a nice resting place, representing older age. It was also interesting to learn that as Dr. Nitobe himself got older he became more interested in combining the eastern and western worlds and this is represented in the garden. At the beginning, the plants are more native to the Japanese climate and as we walk through the garden there is more plant life local to the west coast. 

We were both very inspired by this presentation of a garden. It specifically does not have any fruiting or herbaceous plants that are designed to consume. It is a work of art, and a story. It is natural but also highly curated. 

As English teachers we considered the possibilities of touring this, or other Japanese gardens and learning the stories that they tell, and then asking students to reflect on what their life would look like as a garden. What plants would be there? What stories would it tell? Upon doing some reading I learned that Japanese gardens are supposed to separate you from the chaos outside its walls, and this can also be a useful idea for students who can have a hard time finding peaceful moments in their tumultuous lives. 

After lunch we reconvened at the UBC Greenhouse. Although I (Caelan) have been a UBC student for 6 years, I have never had the opportunity to go inside the greenhouse. It is warm and filled with so many beautiful plants! After the Orchard Garden Guardian, Chris, gave us instructions on tomato up-potting we got to work. Up-potting is the process of moving plants into bigger pots to accommodate their growing roots. Throughout this process we learned about soil moisture, maintaining root integrity, and how to avoid some potential plant diseases. 

Leo in the greenhouse ready to up-pot some tomatoes. 

As social studies teachers, we see value in involving students in the process of growing and caring for plants that produce the food we eat. For many people, their connection with food starts at the grocery store. When students are able to see the effort and care that goes into food production, students gain insight into the lives of agricultural workers and the supply chain process that affects the food we eat.

Tomatoes that we planted today at the Orchard Garden. 

Later in the day our group split up to either paint signs for the garden (pictures to come in future blog posts), or plant tomatoes in the garden beds. While planting tomatoes, we learned a new piece of vocabulary from Chris. This new term is adventitious roots and it refers to plant roots that form from non-root tissue. In the case of the tomatoes, it was referring to roots that may grow from the part of the stem that was buried under soil. Despite being in a diverse group of Teacher Candidates, this term was new to most of us! This demonstrates the endless learning opportunities that life in the garden presents.

Ted Tetsuo Aoki's short essay, Bridges That Rim the Pacific

Today, at beautiful Nitobe Gardens, I remembered that there was a short essay about 'bridges' written by the famous UBC and University of Alberta curriculum theorist, Dr. Ted Aoki, and that I had heard that this essay referred to a walk in Nitobe Gardens.

I found a version of this 1991 essay in a book available as an e-book from the UBC Library -- Curriculum in a New Key: The Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki.

Here is a link to this evocative 2-page essay that talks about Dr. Inazo Nitobe and his wish to bridge East and West, to be a bridge across the Pacific Ocean. The essay also talks about one of the bridges in Nitobe Gardens (the zigzag 'bridge of marriage at the appropriate age', I'm guessing), and describes it in a time of year when the irises are blooming.

Nitobe Garden zigzag bridge with the irises blooming.
Photo credit: Daniel Mosquin, Creative Commons Licence, UBC Botanical Garden 

CFE Day 3

Vivienne: 
After coming down with a bit of an illness, I was unable to attend today’s Soundscaping workshop. However, I’d love to speak a little about our first two days at our CFE, although my fellow TCs have already done an incredible job!

Having not gardened since I was a child, I was a little worried that all the weeding skills my mom and grandparents imbued on me would have been totally lost over the years. However, they quickly came back under the guidance of the Garden Guardian, Chris. Both Monday and Tuesday opened with Susan’s accordion stylings, paired with (what I would call at least!) mini history lessons on Old English farming practices and songs. These little musical moments helped us both to start our day and created a bit of an instant-bond when most of us (barring the ever-musical Gio) were challenged to sing-along to a completely unfamiliar tune with a group of people we might not know all too well yet. To me, this brought me back to the lighthearted and silly joy of singing as a class in elementary school. I can completely see how this might be a playful strategy to break the ice in the first opening days of class, whether that be when we have classrooms of our own or when we return to our UBC courses in June! 

On our second day in the Orchard Garden, Jo took over and led us on an eco-poetry workshop. Under her instruction, we connected with the different parts of the garden that called to us and tried to call back to them. I was particularly struck by the Princess tree and wrote an ode to this beautiful, if distant, globulous entity. In writing this ode, and in talking with the rest of the group, I was brought back to my unit covering Pablo Neruda’s Odes to Common Things during my practicum. As someone who deeply resisted any sort of tactile/physical learning as a highschool student, my time with Jo and the rest of the group challenged these hesitations. During my practicum, I saw just how valuable this kind of learning is as so many of my students responded to the ability to get up and moving. Being with Jo and the rest of the Orchard group further cemented the value of this learning for me as I saw myself making deeper connections with what surrounded me as a result of interacting with it directly. It’s my hope that should I be able to use my Neruda unit again that I will be able to take students out into the world, or even on a field trip, to facilitate their own creation of odes to what is common. 

Leo:
Today, we had some fun playing with (technological, human-made, natural) sounds under the direction of Diana Ihnatovych. The weather channel’d predicted rain but, alas, we were blessed with a pleasantly-cloudy continuation of this curiously cold May. And so we ventured out into the great urban yonder, armed with not but a mighty writing utensil, a sheet of paper, and our ears - and we listened.

The world seems quiet when we do not listen. Only when we lend the world our ears do we realise how loud it truly is, everywhere and all the time. Two plane engines. Chickadees, sparrows, crows. Text alerts. A water fountain. Footsteps. Skateboarders. Wind. Someone calling their friend sexy. All part of a symphony to rival Beethoven’s 9th. 

And so, we visualised these sounds. How? This we all did differently. I drew pictures, literal signifiers of the sources of all those noises - a tree, a bird, water, shoes. Others represented through shapes and linework, like the peaks and valleys of an ECG rhythm strip, or the chaotic results of a lie detector test.

When we were all finished with our individual observations, we separated into two groups and created soundscapes, shapes and colours on chart paper to trace the path of all the noise of Point Grey Campus. The groups went in very different directions, both equally rewarding, equally evocative.

The first (my group) drew somewhat of a more literal sort of landscape, albeit with an abstractedly metaphorical twist: we visually “rewilded” this gloriously grey campus of ours (it is, after all, Point Grey) by turning all the sounds we heard (jet engines, phone notifications, footsteps, oddly flirtatious cross-avenue greetings) into natural beings (thunder, a songbird, deer steps, tall grass). We invited our audience to touch any section of the landscape, and we recreated the respective sound: a choir of five come to turn the deserted front hall of Scarfe into a cacophonous amalgam of the great outdoors. 

The other group created, essentially, sheet music: arrows, waves, loops, spikes, stars, lines, dots all came together to build a score for voice and body. They used markers, crinkling paper, whistling, whooshing, and tapping all at once to weave a tapestry of nature, technology, and humanity. 

I’m a musician myself, and fascinating it was to think about noise as music - the hum of air ventilation, the roar of an airplane - a John Cage-ian dismantling of preconceived understandings of what, and what doesn’t, constitute(s) music. I considered the possible crosscurricular applications of this sort of activity: the poetic, literary, scientific, ecocritical, biological, artistic, linguistic, and musical. I would be curious to see how students of all ages would take to this sort of undertaking.

After lunch, we gardened. The sun came out to help us along in our great endeavor to transplant some tomato plants from greenhouse to ground. We harvested some kale, ate some kale, discovered that yellow kale buds taste oddly like broccoli, found some slugs, saved them from death-by-shoveling, and homed some soon-to-be tomatoes in the dark, rich soil. Being in the garden has been a wonderful break from the go-go-go of practicum, the endless observations and planning and extreme lack of a work/life balance. The garden is patient, and it requires of us all a patience found little elsewhere in this chaotic world. 

Group soundscape 1:

 

 

Ground soundscape 2:

Caelan and Lauren's soundscapes:

Tomato plants:

 

Gardening:

 I'm glad you enjoyed, and wish you all well for the rest of this experience!

Here are my preparatory notes for yesterday's eco-poetry workshop. 

Enjoy!

Jo

Eco-poetry workshop in the Orchard Garden

May 17, 2022 

The aim of this workshop is to: 

• explore what we understand by eco-poetry 

• experiment with an array of eco-poetic activities, and consider how we may draw from these in our teaching

• consider the role of a gardener and beings in and around the garden.

Eco-poetry?

Let’s begin with what we already know about eco-poetry; and how this may connect with various subject areas ...

Eco-poetry: 

• has a strong ecological focus and is about the desire for creating change

• is nature poetry that imagines changing the ways people think, feel about, and live and respond to the planet

• supports a poetic, cultural, and spiritual orientation to life

• explores interconnectedness between humans and non-humans and gives voice to more-than-human worlds

• considers the possibilities of renewing our commitment to places such as The Orchard Garden through a multiple literacies lens. 

Activity 1: Encountering beings in the garden 

Aims: explore how being outdoors can enhance writing and make writing poetry enjoyable; consider beings living in the garden.

Wander around the garden and stop by a being who calls to you! This could be a tree, a plant, a bee … What do you think I mean by call to you? Draws your attention, catches your eye … 

Connect with this plant for about five minutes, sitting or standing or moving nearby; no writing just observing, maybe closing your eyes, smelling, letting its leaves brush your skin …

Write words to describe your experiences of being with this tree or plant, e.g., create a word-bank / bevy, gathering, collection, group … to describe what you see, smell, sounds, colours, shapes, textures, movement, gestures, feelings …

Each person shares their words, gestures, acts movement …

With this knowledge of another being, we’re going to create a praise poem or an ode inspired by mentions of Odes in yesterday’s workshop. Experiences of teaching odes before? 

An ode comes in many forms – short, long, rhyming, nonrhyming, but a key characteristic is odes celebrate a being, tree, plant, person, place ... 

Odes often begin with “O Picnic Table …!” and consist of 4-lines, flamboyant, meditative, something else. 

3-5 minutes to write an ode. 

Share.

Discuss possible ways to adapt this activity for different subject areas & ages …?

Various poetic forms, e.g., haiku with 5-7-5 syllable pattern, Fibonacci sequence poems, Bridges Math and Art …

Activity 2 – Encountering voices in the garden

Aims: Eco-poetry helps us to take a fresh look at life; consider the garden from different perspectives and multiple literacies. 

Writing in ways that do not place human interests at the centre helps to shift attitudes and make room for wonder. Rich in many languages, only a few of which are human, eco-poetry gives voice to the languages of trees, plants, oceans, clouds …

These beings speak to us and may even gift inspiring messages as to how we might move forward. 

In pairs, create a call and response poem between a being, e.g., a bee, tree, plant and a gardener. Person 1 imagines being a tree, plant, bird, bumble bee, shed …; and person 2 a gardener.

Person 1 calls, and person 2 responds. 

A call? Could be a question, a surprise, a random happening, advice, a complaint …

A response? Could be an answer, another question or happening … 

Write three verses, with between 2 & 6 lines in each.

Consider layers in the garden – beneath the soil, mostly unseen roots; the ground; air and skies above …

Show image of different spheres, and where gardener is in relation.

Activity 3 – Bringing wonder to the wider area

Aims: Explore how the Orchard Garden brings wonder to the wider area through the voices of at least three beings.

So often I consider the garden as an oasis surrounded by an encroaching campus and want to give voice to more complex relations with the help of beings who live and travel among the garden and surrounding areas. 

For example, a poetic conversation between comfrey bell flowers, bees travelling across campus, and the Scarfe Building … 

Let’s go for a walk near to the garden and encounter beings living there. Consider living connections with the garden … 

Consider ways in which eco-poetry makes environmentalism happen, influence of stories about a place, patience, humour … 

Eco-poetry provides both a healthy way to respond to issues we care about, as well as thinking creatively about words and the worlds we create.

In groups of 3 or 4 write a poem or a poetic conversation in response to our walking experience, and share!

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!

*

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.

*

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.

*

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...

Day 1 of our UBC Orchard Garden CFE!

            What a beautiful and sunny first day at the UBC Orchard Garden! With the recent weather they’re calling “Mayvember” (the coldest May in 100 years!) I certainly had my doubts, but I actually may have I got my base-tan. Or maybe just a neck burn – I’ll start bringing sunscreen tomorrow (oops). Such a lovely start, and a beautiful way to officially close the doors on our practicums. While it was great to see some familiar faces again, I know we all miss those sweet kiddos we made connections with over the last 10 weeks, and honestly I can’t imagine a better transition back than a sunny day in the garden. My name is Amy, and today I will be joined by Gio as my blog partner.

            The afternoon was spent working in the garden where we, the teacher candidates, were responsible for weeding, cutting back old growth, and other gardening tasks. Only a few of us had actual gardening experience, which makes for a great and diverse group of learners! We split into two groups: one group began weeding, and the other made little “fences” around garden areas using bamboo sticks and twine. While many of us had been raised thinking we have to weed every single weed out of gardens, one remarkable thing about the UBC Orchard Gardens is that they believe in the conservation of the “unplanned”. This means that we only removed weeds that were directly in the space of the plants purposefully planted, while allowing those outside that area to thrive all they want. Personally, I have next to zero expertise in gardening, and have only ever been instructed to remove like mad at the sight of any weed. This new concept, however, felt right. I’ll definitely be adopting this mentality some day, if I ever have my own garden. Oh! Another thing I’ll adopt is the idea of using creeping thyme as a lawn! Grass requires a lot more water, and people often use chemical fertiliser to keep it green. Creeping thyme, however, is soft, lush, and even edible. Plus, you don’t need to mow it! I wish every lawn looked like this. Check it out:

(Photo: close up of creeping thyme)

            Before we go on to reflect on our first-day experience, I have to share the best part of my day: we actually saw a coyote!! It came by so quietly to check us out that we didn’t notice it until one of our teammates saw it and clapped at it. Even though it was so adorable, it’s really important to keep the wildlife wild and not get them too accustomed to human interaction.

(Photo: our coyote friend running away. She got SO close to us! This was the fastest Gio could get his phone out)

The UBC Orchard Garden is a finalist in the Jane Goodall Institute global Roots and Shoots award

 

What a great honour, from such an iconic and important environmental educator and activist! The UBC Orchard Garden was nominated and judged a finalist for this global award from the Jane Goodall Institute. We have been very grateful to the JGI for a series of Roots and Shoots grants that have supported our new food forest project and educational engagements with teacher candidates around sustainable food and garden-based education. Here’s a link to the UBC Faculty of Education article on this.