Entrance Slip: Teaching Gardens

Teaching gardens offer the opportunity to exhibit math in it's 'natural' habitat in a sense. The first math that any people groups experienced was in nature and I think we do a disservice to our students to eliminate this foundation of math. With a garden, the first application I think of is in agriculture. So many people without experience in agriculture assume you just dig a few holes in straight lines, put a seed in the ground and walk away. But anyone who gardens or farms can tell you the intricacies involved in planting, growing, and harvesting. I'm not much of a grower, so I know I'm missing things, but I think it'd be great to explore the ways plants grow together, which types grow well together and which will kill each other, the different spacing that different plants need, the amounts of water different plants need, and things like that. Students could analyze the data for the spacing and watering their plants will need and figure out how to optimize the shape of their garden to service all their plants the best. This obviously leads into discussions on ecology, sustainability, and responsible usage of resources, but it can also bring in discussions on cultural knowledge. Different cultures understand their different lands and plants, and it's an interesting way to bring in discussion of how disrespect for these knowledges can lead to disaster, like the utter failure that was the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme. The locals knew that peanuts wouldn't grow, but the racism of the colonial administrators meant this knowledge was ignored and, in the end, the land was destroyed. I think a garden is a great medium for interdisciplinary teaching. What I've described above can easily integrate into a science class and a history/socials class.

I really like the "local agency" aspect mentioned in the article. A sense of community is, I think, most securely formed through the creation of something. People feel tied together when they have an investment in something that has been made as a group. Gardens offer this and more. Communities come together to plant and grow, literally bringing life together. But the garden extends past this. It's not just the planting, but the building of the garden in the first place, the maintenance of the garden throughout the season, and the harvest time. There's food to share at the end (possibly) and a place of nature to enjoy during the process. It can become a gathering place, like a community park, but something that the community itself has made for itself. Community gardens tie together so many aspects of community building. In a teaching perspective, this community building can help students with SEL and belonging, and the local agency aspect can help put action and globalisation in perspective. As we expand and broaden how we teach subjects in schools, we're sometimes at risk of losing the small scale, practical scale of our subjects. Students can sometimes get lost in the noise of a world so much bigger than anything they can experience right in front of them. With a garden, especially one in which school subjects and global issues are integrated, students are given an outlet for action and agency that they have a personal investment in. They can enact change, see results, and build something both locally tangible and globally meaningful. As a math teacher, I can tap into this potential of the garden by using it to show math as something both locally tangible and globally meaningful.