Thanks for visiting our project and video! As a learning scientist, I'm very interested in the ways that learning opportunities consequentially link people, content. and context together. To foster deeper connections, Sallie, Eileen, and I co-organized a conference and networked learning among researchers, scientists, and teachers at school garden sites across the US southwest deserts. We're exploring how to position our common ecoregion (i.e., people and places - past, present, and future) as an anchor to support, sustain, and spread garden-based science teaching in the US southwest. Against this backdrop, below are two among many ways you might engage with our video.

Questions and connections, please!

1. In general, I'm interested to hear any questions the video raises for you as well as all the connections to your own experiences, expertise, and perspective.
2. More specifically, gardens are just one way to organize place-based learning and I wonder what other ecoregion-specific connections teachers and researchers see as relations or extensions in the US southwest? or in your own ecoregion (view EPA ecoregions here)?

As a teacher educator and developmental scientist, I am interested in ways that we can support students and educators to spend more time cultivating school/ community gardens. Working with Steve, Sallie and the other educators in our ecoregion has inspired me to see how school gardens can help build and transform communities. We recognize that many educators around the world are working with students in gardens, and reflecting on practices and benefits. We would love to hear about synergistic work that you are doing!

Here are some questions that I would love to have participants respond to, in addition to the questions that Steve has raised:

1. How might we draw attention to the social and emotional benefits of gardening, for children and other participants in school and community gardens? What benefits have you noticed?

2. In what ways can native gardens help children connect to local places and organisms?

Thank you for sharing your project. I'm wondering if/how you engage your teachers, students and families in culturally relevant learning? Do you have mechanisms for using the assets that students and families are already bringing to the project?

As one of the Co-PIs of the School Gardeners’ Southwest Desert Almanac Conference and a geographer and director of the University of Arizona's Community and School Garden Program, I am delighted to be part of the STEM for All Video Showcase.  Out February conference was a gathering of ideas, innovation, energy and commitment that situated school gardens as dynamic teaching and learning spaces at its center. The most exciting outcome for me—besides the creation of a network of diverse and engaged school garden advocates and adherents—is the garden-based cases or lessons that are currently being assembled by participants that will be added to our website over the summer. See an exemplar here. The almanac theme of the conference is meant to recognize that science-oriented garden learning should be place-based—including recognizing the relevance of local ecology, soil, climate and weather, etc.—as well as draw from the cultural knowledge and histories of the people and the cultivation practices in that place.  Our almanac will be a virtual text reflecting the collaborative production of knowledge, ideas, and practices around school garden that exist in the Southwest Desert region. It is also intended as a model for other school gardeners to develop similar almanacs that reflect the particularities of their eco-regions.

Thoughts?  I'd be interested to hear from teachers, researchers and community members about the opportunities for collaborative research around school gardens they would like to see happen or have been a part of.

Thank you for sharing your project! Conceptualizing your network as an Almanac is an interesting idea--to me it infers an ever-evolving set of resources. In that respect, I am particularly interested in the resources that will eventually be accessible via your website and how they will support districts and teachers less familiar with gardening and animal husbandry. I have found in my work in primary schools, that teachers' interests and personal expertise are frequently the driving force for initiating school gardening programs and even on how much science teaching is happening in a classroom. What vision do you have for igniting enthusiasm for school gardens more broadly--and perhaps in eco-regions that are less easily defined (e.g. urban areas)?

This question gets to the core of our grant, Alison - thank you for asking! The short answer is that we view ecoregions as common ground. This common ground makes for more readily sharing the value that garden-based science teaching creates within a school to other schools across the many districts  with the same general habitat (in our ecoregion, schools in deserts with two gardening cycles every academic year). Urban areas where aspects of an ecoregion might be "muted" are tricky but the larger idea, for us, is common ground. Urban areas in the same ecoregion share more common ground.  The longer answer: our vision for igniting enthusiasm, for inspiring and enabling school gardening is at least two-fold: recognizing and accelerating existing momentum.

Our efforts begin by recognizing (and being inspired by) the fact that school gardens are already growing. A resurgence in school gardening is clear from the USDA farm-to-school census. Their data provides a comprehensive, nation-wide picture of the prevalence of school gardening over time, with noteworthy growth from 2013 to 2015 alone, and a third census underway now. At the same time, this documented growth is due, in part, to numerous school garden support organizations, including city-centered networks like City Sprouts and Washington DC's School Gardens Program as well as long-standing national leadership by LifeLab. Together, the growth of gardening coupled with the good work of support organizations goes a long way in igniting enthusiasm for school gardens and, as evidence of it, there is no shortage of vision for how to accelerate these efforts, including new models like Green Our Planet.

Our own vision for accelerating school gardening seeks to involve and invest schools more deeply with both their local communities and wider ecoregion neighbors. An ecoregion is a common ground for school gardening. Teachers can use gardening to situate education activities in relation to local peoples and places- past, present, and future. Our conference created opportunities to demonstrate and discuss the practical wisdom of garden-based science teaching. We're translating these discussions into teacher-authored case studies (shaped by Halverson's (2004) idea of artifact-based phronetic narratives) to share throughout the ecoregion (we would love feedback on our case exemplar!). We're also transforming these discussions into "design conjectures." Our conjecture will enable us to explore how aspects of the demonstrations that were intentionally designed (e.g., student roles and responsibilities, resources, technology, so forth) both (1) relate to evidence-based principles about how people learn and (2) inform  ongoing ecoregional co-design efforts (and new iterations of various case studies). 

Thank you, Steve! Your project has reignited my interest in school gardens and I plan on sharing it with some school district leaders that I know! As we are all faced with developing flexible ways of supporting teaching and learning from a distance, do you folks have any ideas about how to keeping momentum for gardening high if students are not gathering in schools? 

Hi Rick, Your experiment with marigolds and color is a great idea.  I will be passing it along to others.  We have trained Title I K-5 students to do a similar experiment where they select plants for robustness, cold and heat tolerance, resistance to insects, etc. and harvest them for continued observation the following years. These longer term experiments are a bit too long for younger grades but third graders do understand the relevance and are ready in the new school year to keep the project going.

With the marigolds, we use them to teach companion planting and their cultural relevance to community religious holidays and special events.  We also use them to connect art and science where children learn to make dyes.

As to your question about garden maintenance through the summer and COVID19, I'll turn to summer first.  We mostly retire our beds for the summer to save water and give the soil a rest.  In those schools, however, who offer summer programs, we often maintain the gardens through a high school mentorship program we sponsor where older students support younger ones to learn from the gardens and the school's surrounding ecology. This program has been successful in social and emotional ways as well as younger kids meet older ones who look like them and come from similar communities and who are excited about gardens as learning spaces. 

As for how to maintain gardens during COVID19, well, it's not dissimilar to our summer practice only that schools closed in early March at the height of the harvest season!  We continued to maintain the gardens through university interns, school garden coordinators and program coordinators who are part of the UA Community and School Garden Program.  We harvested over a month's worth of produce and distributed it to the low-income families in the schools we support as parents came to the schools for their children's Grab-and-Go breakfasts and lunch. Then we "zipped up" those gardens for the summer in anticipation of the monsoon rains that would irrigate--through storage in harvesting cisterns--these gardens once again come the fall.

Others have asked us how we will teach through school gardens if the K-12 students don't return in the fall because of a resurgence of COVID19.  We have been actively involved in preparing for that possibility by making videos, developing more lesson plans, and creating read alongs with garden-based children's literature developed for parents and online teachers. If you are interested in seeing some of this material, please check out the following website that supports learning at a distance. 

Great hands-on work that is contextualized, relevant, necessary and inspiring.  With so many levels (conservation, ecology, scientific thinking, mathematics, etc.), there are endless possibilities for a curriculum that rejuvenates every season! Thanks for sharing.