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Introduction
Nature is most abundant on the edge. The interface between two
or more ecosystems, organisms, or cultures is often where the most
valuable, diverse, and productive elements of a system emerge. Like the
diversity of a healthy ecosystem, diverse educational communities are
more resilient, socially efficient, and sustainable. In the face of
global environmental and economic challenges, we as ESL educators have
the opportunity to facilitate the interpretation of scientific knowledge
for diverse communities of international stakeholders. By teaching
language through context and applying permaculture design to curriculum
design, we can facilitate the exchange of ecological wisdom in an
international context.
The Context
The International High School at Lafayette
The International High School at Lafayette (IHSL) is a public
school in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York, USA that serves 350
late-entry English language learners (ELLs) speaking 50 different
languages. The Internationals Model of ESL Education focuses on language
development through context, heterogeneous grouping, project-based
learning, and autonomous decision making. Learn more about IHSL by
watching the documentary “I Learn America”
(Dissard & Peng, 2013).
What Is Permaculture?
Permaculture is a creative design process that mimics patterns
in nature in order to create self-regulating systems. Originally
developed in the 1970s by Australian biologists Bill Mollison and David
Holmgren and Japanese agronomist Masanobu Fukuoka, permaculture is
a versatile design approach that has since extended to fields as broad
as engineering, urban planning, economics, and now curriculum design
(“What is permaculture?” n.d. )
Permaculture Design and the SIFE Victory Garden Curriculum
Students are like flowers. Each one is unique, each one is
beautiful, and it takes nurturing and patience to help them
grow.
Sometimes, when you plant a seed, it is hard to imagine how big
or how beautifully it can grow. From 2010–2012, I was privileged to
direct IHSL’s SIFE program, a class where at-risk students could receive
nurturing support to grow to their fullest potential. Despite
differences in education, status, and abilities, my students are
resilient transplants. They bring with them incredible strengths,
stories, and experiences that enriched and enlightened our classroom
every day.
How can educators bring together so many different young
people, and assure that every single person is included and engaged in
challenging, meaningful learning? How can SIFE students be served with
limited space and resources? The permaculture adage goes, “The problem
is the solution.” All it takes is a little outside-the-box and
outside-the-classroom ingenuity.
Engaging Everyone: The Victory Garden
Every person, no matter where they come from, has a connection
to food. This universal human experience was a starting point for
students to communicate about the role of food, plants, and agriculture
in their different cultural backgrounds. They then connected personal
experiences to the larger social economic context of food distribution,
hunger, and malnutrition in the world. By analyzing evidence from
scientific and news articles, students wrote analytical essays exploring
how they could provide healthy, fresh, and economical food solutions
within their communities.
After writing about food access, the students became eager to
act. We wanted to build a garden—but like most public high schools in
NYC, we lacked outdoor space. After putting calls through various
channels, Dag Hammerskjold Elementary (P.S. 254) in Sheepshead Bay
informed us that they wanted an educational garden, but lacked the
resources to maintain one.
Thus began an incredible partnership between P.S. 254 and IHSL.
Ms. Lisa Solo and Ms. Louise Atsaves are two incredible teachers who
taught us about the Victory Garden, an existing garden space with a rich
history spanning back to World War II. They collaborated with us
tirelessly to bring the garden back to life. Eleventh-grade student
Abdoul Akanje, then interning with documentary filmmaker Jean-Michel
Dissard, created a beautiful 8-minute video that depicts our garden
work. It depicts how to effectively engage SIFE students to use math,
science, and English to help their community in a meaningful way.
Participatory Publishing
The Victory Garden Project culminated in a work day where my
9th- and 10th-grade SIFE students taught PS 254’s first-grade students
about horticulture. Concurrent with weekly garden sessions were daily
readings regarding evolutionary biology, chemistry, and ecology. While
learning about plant adaptations, students began writing “Tree of Life”
memoirs. Students wrote a series of memoirs about their “roots,” their
“stems of support” their “branching out” experiences, and their
“blossoming” experiences. Students then published a book of memoirs
titled “Growing Experiences.”
ESL students need a studio, a stage, and an audience to make
their class work meaningful. We celebrated and released our “Growing
Experiences” book at our student-organized Café Night. Students worked
in committees to organize the event from the ground up. Students read
their books to their families and friends over fresh food from our
garden and food from our different countries. The sense of pride that
these often marginalized students had in their accomplishments was
tangible. My SIFE students were heroes that day.
For weeks afterwards, students carried their “Growing
Experiences” books with them, eager to read each other’s memoirs during
sustained silent reading or free time. As a final project, students
wrote an analytical essay with one important requirement: They needed to
use each other’s stories as evidence. (See Table 1 for a participatory
publishing curriculum design template.) This worked incredibly well.
Students were motivated to read about their peers. These texts were
self-differentiated in terms of length and lexile levels. Finally, if
the reader needed clarification, he or she could simply interview the
author.
Table 1. Participatory Publishing Curriculum Design
Template for the “Growing Experiences: Victory Garden
Curriculum”
|
Essential question: Which high-level questions will you explore in this unit? |
|
Texts to read for
evidence: Which texts will you use as evidence responding to
these essential questions? |
|
Texts that model desired
writing task: Which examples of writing will you use to model
for your students? |
|
Authentic writing task: What kinds of products would you like your students to
create? |
|
Writing process: How will students revise and conference about their
work? |
|
Publishing: How will this writing be published? |
|
Celebration: How
will this writing be shared with others? |
|
Analytical essay:
How will students use each other’s writing along with other textual
evidence in an essay response to an essential question from the
unit? |
Permaculture Design and Curriculum Design
When working with SIFE students, it is important to make the
community the curriculum. Academic achievement can often be a distant
concept for students who have experienced interruptions in their formal
education. Simultaneously, SIFE students offer a rich array of
experiences and skills that can be exchanged and validated in the ESL
classroom. The practical application of literacy and numeracy skills for
authentic, observable, and social projects creates a point of entry for
SIFE/ELLs that makes academia relevant to their lives.
In Table 2, please find a chart of how permaculture design
principles made the Victory
Garden curriculum possible. These principles are based on the writings
of David Holmgren and Bill Mollison (Permacultureprinciples.com
n.d.) :
|
Permaculture Principle in an Eco-Agricultural Context |
Application in the ESL Classroom |
|
Observe and
interact: By taking time to engage with nature we can design
solutions that suit our particular situation. |
When working with students from many
different cultural, linguistic, and academic backgrounds, it is
essential to observe and interact with students to discover what
strengths, experiences, and talents they have to
offer. |
|
Catch and store
energy: By developing systems that collect resources at peak
abundance, we can use them in times of need. |
How to do you capture and sustain
student energy and enthusiasm? By making work student centered and
meaningful so that students are motivated over
time. |
|
Obtain a yield:
Ensure that you are getting truly useful rewards as part of the work
that you are doing. |
Show students that they can be
successful. Celebrate their work, and they will push themselves to
accomplish more. |
|
Apply self-regulation and
accept feedback: We need to discourage inappropriate activity
to ensure that systems can continue to function
well. |
As beginning writers, students need
constant feedback and affirmation in order to make their writing
stronger. Scaffold self-monitoring and personalized goal-setting as part
of the learning process. |
|
Use and value renewable
resources and services: Make the best use of nature's
abundance to
reduce our consumptive behavior and dependence on nonrenewable
resources. |
Renew student interest by recycling
content, concepts, and projects that are student centered and directly
applicable to the real world. |
|
Produce no waste:
By valuing and making use of all the resources that are available to us,
nothing goes to waste. |
Every project must be purposeful.
Every activity is a component of a future accomplishment. There is no
“busy work.” |
|
Design from patterns to
details: By stepping back, we can observe patterns in nature
and society. These can form the backbone of our designs, with the
details filled in as we go. |
In a spiraling curriculum, every
activity is a component of a future accomplishment. All student
experiences build into a final meaningful project that makes a
difference in the world. |
|
Integrate rather than
segregate: By putting the right things in the right place,
relationships develop between those things and they work together to
support each other. |
Every student, no matter what
language he or she speaks or his or her level of education, has
something to contribute to our classroom community. Rather than be
marginalized, the toughest kids in the school are brought front and
center. |
|
Use small and slow
solutions:Small and slow systems are easier to maintain than
big ones, making better use of local resources and producing more
sustainable outcomes. |
Learning to read and write for the
first time is a slow and tedious process. Great accomplishments take
time and a lot of scaffolding and
differentiation. |
|
Use and value
diversity:Diversity reduces vulnerability to a variety of
threats and takes advantage of the unique nature of the environment in
which it resides. |
The vast diversity of our community
is our greatest asset. There are so many amazing stories to tell and
skills to share. |
|
Use edges and value the
marginal: The interface between things is where the most
interesting events take place. These are often the most valuable,
diverse, and productive elements in the system. |
SIFE students and ELLs struggle with
being marginalized by society. They are at the edge of creative change
and are incredibly valuable toward the center. |
|
Creatively use and respond
to change:We can have a positive impact on inevitable change
by carefully observing, and then intervening at the right
time. |
This entire project was created out
of a 15-foot by 15-foot classroom with no windows, with the toughest
kids in the NYC DOE. With creative permaculture, there is no limit to
what our communities can accomplish. |
Conclusion
The biggest tree can grow from the tiniest seed. SIFE and ELLs
are capable of accomplishing great things for themselves and their
communities. As demonstrated, permaculture as a pedagogical approach can
be a valuable tool in the multicultural classroom. More research and
experimentation must be done to transcend the disciplines of
linguistics, ecology, and pedagogy. Our society needs international
solutions to the global challenges we face. Every single one of our
students deserves to be at the forefront of this discussion.
References
New York Department of Education. (n.d.). Educator resources:
SIFE. Retrieved from http://schools.nyc.gov/Academics/ELL/EducatorResources/SIFE.htm
Dissard, J. -M. (Director/Producer), & Peng, G.
(Director/Producer). (2013). I learn America [Motion
picture]. United States.
Permacultureprinciples.com (n.d.). What is
permaculture? Retrieved from http://permacultureprinciples.com/
What is permaculture? (n.d.). Retrieved December 20, 2015, from
http://www.heathcote.org/PCIntro/2WhatIsPermaculture.htm
Christina
Zawerucha is a teacher, farmer, and social
entrepreneur who specializes in developing sustainability literacy
programs in an international context. Focused on working with immigrant
populations, refugees and ELLs, Christina has developed participatory
curricula with public, nonprofit, and higher education institutions in Brooklyn,
Pennsylvania, Ecuador, Ukraine,
and now Ethiopia.
Christina works as an ESL instructor at the Virginia Tech Language and
Culture Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia, and as a permaculture
specialist for GreenPath food in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Learn more at www.permaculture4peace.org.
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