Educational spaces have material and symbolic dimensions that organize students’ learning experiences and communicate what counts as legitimate forms of knowledge and knowledge production. This article describes the creation of a school garden, in which I, as a university-based researcher, worked collaboratively with newcomer and Canadian-born English language learners and their teacher at the elementary level to connect learning meaningfully with students’ lives (see Figure 1). The purpose of the article is to discuss how the school garden became a pedagogical space that incorporated funds of knowledge from the families of students, facilitated parent engagement with the school, and produced deeper understandings about the school and community context. The creation of the school garden built upon and extended the rich knowledge and prior experience that the students brought with them to the classroom, and productively connected these resources with curriculum learning and the teacher’s instructional practice.

Figure 1. Students in the school garden

Much scholarship relating to the education of culturally and linguistically diverse children has focused on the benefits of linking school-based learning with the cultural and linguistic resources available in children’s homes and communities (e.g., Cummins & Early, 2011; Janks & Comber, 2006; Lopez-Gopar, 2007; Lotherington, Holland, Sotoudeh, & Zentena, 2008; Marshall & Toohey, 2010; Stein, 2008; Stille, 2011). For instance, these researchers have documented the role of identity affirmation in promoting learners’ positive feelings toward and cognitive engagement with learning. Rather than imposing the value of only school-based knowledge, this identity-affirming instructional practice recognizes the diversity of students’ knowledge and attests to its value in the educational context. Building on this research, the present article documents how pedagogy that is grounded in funds of knowledge from the students’ home and cultural background can contribute to reshaping curriculum knowledge across school subject areas.

PROJECT SETTING AND BACKGROUND

The garden project took place in an urban elementary school in Canada. The school is among the largest elementary schools in North America, serving more than 2,000 students from kindergarten to grade five. Ninety-five percent of the students speak a language other than English at home, and the majority of families have arrived in Canada within the past 5 years. The project took place in a grade three class in which the students and/or their families had come from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, India, Kuwait, and Sri Lanka. The teacher and I settled on a goal to explicitly draw upon students’ prior experience and background knowledge as resources for learning. These strategies promoted the transfer of concepts from the students’ home language(s) to English, and created a teaching and learning context that affirmed the students’ identities (Cummins et al., 2005). We chose to concentrate on the social studies curriculum topic of urban and rural communities, which provided a meaningful focus for our work and allowed us to connect with the students’ experiences in the different communities in which they had lived.

At the beginning of the project, the students conducted broad research about communities. The grade three social studies curriculum required students to demonstrate understanding of the features of urban and rural communities, so we gathered and read books from the school library about communities, community resources, and land use. To connect with the students’ prior experience, we used Google Earth to view images of urban and rural communities around the world, especially the countries where the students and their families were from. To showcase what they had learned, the students prepared PowerPoint presentations on topics of their choice, such as “Overpopulation in India” and “Traditional foods in Turkey.” We encouraged students to work with family, friends, and/or community members to write and practice their presentations in both their first language and English. The students also interviewed their parents and fellow students about the school community. They wrote interview questions such as “Where were you born?” and “What do you like about our community?” and they recorded the responses on a graphic organizer. The students summarized the attributes of the school community and shared their findings with the whole class.

One of the students’ notable findings was that many families in the community had come from rural areas and had a great deal of experience in farming and agriculture. Because the students and their families now lived in a cluster of high-rise apartment buildings, they had few opportunities to draw upon these experiences in their new Canadian home. For instance, one mother explained: “Surrounding our house we had tea and pepper, and around our house we planted vegetables and flowers. . . . Here we can’t grow anything.” Her daughter added: “We can’t keep plants in our apartment.” We brainstormed ideas about how to make a positive contribution to the school community; and we decided to create a school garden and invite parents to assist us in this activity.

The setting for the garden was one of several courtyards at the school. Because of school board and union policies, caretakers could not take care of these spaces. The caretakers had enough work maintaining the large and overpopulated school: In addition to the original school building, two additions had enlarged the building, and 19 portable structures held classes on space borrowed from the school playground. As a result of this overcrowding, the school had three staggered recess times to accommodate students on the playground throughout the day. During recess, hundreds of children played, ran, and kicked balls. The relatively quieter spaces were along the wall of the school, where small groups of children stood, chatting and playing clapping or skipping games. By contrast, the school courtyards were unused, overgrown with weeds and littered with garbage. We set a goal of transforming one of these courtyards into a garden in order to create a space within the school that students and teachers could use and where they could relate to the school environment.

CREATING THE SCHOOL GARDEN AND PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT

Gardens are often sites of collaborative work, involving shared labor. Creating the school garden comprised several stages of preparation and ongoing work. The teachers, the students, their parents, and I put in long hours to prepare the ground by hand (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Students and parents working together in the school garden

Because of school board and union policies, we were not allowed to use any machinery to till the garden. Parents eagerly joined in day after day, volunteering their time and enjoying the opportunity to work with their children at school. Together we pulled weeds, added fresh soil, and turned the earth. Parents shared their gardening skills and promoted positive environmental behavior. Most of the parents had never volunteered at the school, as cultural and linguistic differences had seemed to present a barrier to their involvement with the school. In the garden, however, expertise resided with parents. Their knowledge and prior agricultural experiences were needed contributions to our work. Similarly, working in the school garden provided an opening for parents to contribute their knowledge and resources to the students’ learning. As one father said:

Most of the kids they are not doing outdoor work, they are busy with homework and video games, normally they are not doing any physical things. Gardening is good for physical things; it’s good learning. If you don’t learn anything about agriculture, you don’t understand how farmers are making food for you, how hard it is. So this is real learning. They [the children] know how people are making food for them. When you get food on your table you want to take it; now [they] realize what people are doing for them, and that they should be grateful for that.

CONNECTING THE GARDEN TO CURRICULUM AND PEDAGOGY

Gardens are spaces of experiential curriculum and pedagogy. The teacher used work in the garden to connect with learning outcomes across the curriculum. Digging in the garden, sowing seeds, and watering plants are everyday tasks that engage with broader concepts in science, math, and social studies (Mah, 2011). For instance, the grade three science curriculum required students to learn about the life cycle of plants and soil composition. The garden provided unrestricted, hands-on learning opportunities to engage with these curricular concepts. In mathematics, the curriculum included estimating and measuring standard units of length and using grids. We practiced these learning outcomes by mapping the garden with stakes and string and measuring the perimeter and area of the garden plots. Finally, with regard to the language arts curriculum, which required students to demonstrate the ability to write persuasive letters, the students wrote fund-raising letters to local businesses requesting donations to support the garden project. The students raised approximately $400 in cash and goods, which covered all the costs of the garden; in this manner, the students not only met the curriculum requirements but also received direct and authentic feedback about their persuasive writing skills.

Learning in gardens and in the outdoor environment generates knowledge that cannot be gained from textbooks. Getting dirty, we planted the seeds that filled an unused, invisible courtyard into a place pervaded by people, laughter, and learning. During recess time, many of the students asked if they could spend time working in the garden rather than playing on the playground. Kneeling in the earth and rhythmically, deliberately weeding, planting, or turning the soil, the children worked in silence. The students had the opportunity to contemplate where food originates and the dedicated work required to produce it. They reflected on their rights and responsibilities as members of the community. For instance, one student said, “The school is part of our community. We have to take care of our community.” Following instructions from their parents or their teachers, the children, through their work, felt connected to the place and space around them. Together, as we watched the slow growth from sprouts to plants and flowers, we came to a deeper understanding of both the resources and needs of the community as well as the importance of creating a space that reflected our thoughts about the kinds of places needed for the growth and learning of children. One of the mothers exemplifies this theme that emerged from the project:

This is a crowded area with lots of buildings. They [the kids] need a fresh environment…. The kids are all living in apartments, so they don’t know about gardens, plants. But we already know; in our country we know about the environment. Here people are packed in apartments so they don’t know about fresh air and the environment. Here [in the garden] they will learn something about this.

CONCLUDING REMARKS: PROMOTING IDENTITIES OF COMPETENCE

Creating the garden supported productive integration of the cultural resources that the students and their families brought with them to school. Engaging their prior knowledge and experiences, the students and their families were able to affirm previously invisible topics and subject-matter knowledge as resources for school-based learning. The garden became a material expression of the students’ diverse identities and experiences. Students and parents drew upon the garden to produce new relationships of power, identity, and learning―re/making the ground on which they could stand and enact their identities in school.

The creation of the school garden drew attention not only to what has been gained in relation to this project, but also to what has been lost and sacrificed in current educational practice, which at times seems to disregard the assets and resources that culturally and linguistically diverse students bring with them to school. Families with rural and agricultural backgrounds who immigrate to large urban centers have few opportunities to teach their children what they know about the land. Without access to land of their own, families face challenges in developing their children’s understanding of their knowledge and experience in food production and sustainability. In light of the ecological circumstances of our present time, these families can make an important contribution to knowledge creation and production about environmental issues, for their own children and others.

REFERENCES

Cummins, J., Bismilla, V., Chow, P., Giampapa, F., Cohen, S., Leoni, L., Sandhu, P., & Sastri, P. (2005). Affirming identity in multilingual classrooms. Educational Leadership, 63, 38-43.

Cummins, J., & Early, M. (Eds.). (2011). Identity texts: The collaborative creation of power in multilingual schools. Staffordshire, England: Trentham Books.

Janks, H., & Comber, B. (2006). Critical literacy across continents. In K. Pahl & J. Roswell, (Eds.), Travel notes from the new literacy studies: Instances of practice (pp. 96-117). Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.

Lopez-Gopar, M. E. (2007). Indigenous anonymous bilingual people: Implications for teachers. Bilingual Basics, 9(1).

Lotherington, H., Holland, M., Sotoudeh, S., & Zentena, M. (2008). Project-based community language learning: Three narratives of multilingual story-telling in early childhood education. Canadian Modern Language Review, 65, 125-145.

Marshall, E., & Toohey, K. (2010). Representing family: Community funds of knowledge, bilingualism, and multimodality. Harvard Educational Review, 80, 221-288.

Mah, K. W. (2011). Young gardeners: On gardens as spaces of experiential pedagogy. Public, 41, 98-107.

Stein, P. (2008). Multimodal pedagogies in diverse classrooms: Representation, rights, and resources. New York, NY: Routledge.

Stille, S. (2011). Ethical readings of student texts: Attending to the process and production of identity in classroom-based literacy research. Language & Literacy, 13(2), 66-79.

Acknowledgment: The author would like to thank the teachers, students, and parents involved in this project.

Saskia Stille is a PhD candidate in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on language learning in multilingual school contexts and the integration of digital media in teaching and learning activities.