Community Gardens

deannainmaine

I was watching a Vox YouTube video, How Radical Gardeners Took Back New York City about a few key leaders, such as Hattie Carthan and Liz Christy, in their push to add green landscapes to marginalized parts of New York City. This reminded me of an article I had read many years ago about community gardens and how teachers were using them to not only teach science and nutrition, but to also integrate intergenerational mentoring, multicultural understanding and community service.

The basic premise is that children visit their local community gardens (or Farmers Market) and talk with the people who are tending them. This can be very informal, where the children simply talk with the gardeners about their gardens and the plants they have, or it can be more formalized where the children prepare questions they want to know about the gardens and the gardeners beforehand, which can then lead to further research on their chosen topic. Ideally, there will be a range of cultures and ages represented in the people they talk to about their gardens.

As I was thinking about community gardens and the history I had learned from the video, it occurred to me that these two subjects could easily be meshed together to not only create a wonderful integrated lesson on gardens and the people who tend them, but also the history of urban greening in your local area, or in relation to a history lesson on a particular city. Urban greening can also be studied in relation to climate change and what cities are doing to help mitigate the effects of our heating earth.

Summer provides the perfect opportunity for friends and families to walk around their neighborhood in order to learn, to meet new people and, hopefully, to make new friends.

No matter what you end up doing, remember to have fun and don’t be afraid to get dirty!

#naturebasedlearning #authenticlearning #communitygardens#urbangreening

Community garden