Why Garden in Schools?

Lexi Earl, Pat Thomson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367207588
• eBook ISBN: 9780429558429
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Teaching Science & Technology

This book delves into the complex history of the gardening movement in schools and examines the question why gardens should be built in schools. It offers practical guidance for teachers to begin thinking about how to approach educational gardening.

A resurgence of interest in school gardens is linked to concerns about children's health, food knowledge, lack of outdoor play and contact with the natural world. This book warns against simplistic one-best approaches and makes a case about the complexity of gardening in schools. It is the first critical attempt to address the complex and conflicting notions about school gardens and to tackle the question 'what is the problem to which school gardens are the answer?' Examining the educational theory in which gardening has been explained and advocated, the book explores the way contemporary gardens research has been conducted with specific questions such as 'what works well in school gardens?' Based on case studies of a school establishing a garden and another one maintaining a garden, chapters look at the way in which schools come to frame their gardens. The authors suggest that there are four issues to consider when setting up a school garden or evaluating a pre-existing one – wider social context, public policy, the whole school, and the formal and informal curriculum.

The book ends with a call for consideration of the ways in which school gardens can be built, the myriad practices that constitute an educational garden space and the challenges of maintaining a school garden over the long term. It will be of interest to teachers in primary schools, as well as a key point of reference for scholars, academics and students researching school gardens.

1 Mapping the history of school gardens

Maps are imperfect. They are always drawn from someone’s point of view. Maps represent the material, cultural and political position of their makers. The history of school gardening we present in this chapter is just like any other map, partial and situated. We are limited by the material available to us. What we present is our interpretation. Our intention is not to simply tell a history of school gardens, as if a straightforward account is both possible and desirable. Rather, we look for the reasons gardens are said to be educationally beneficial. We ask – What is the purpose of a school garden? What is the problem for which school gardening is the answer? What are the consequences of this problematisation? What is omitted? We thus focus on the ways in which the story of school gardens has been told, how gardens have been made important and what is said to be educational about them. We also look for what this story does not say, what connections were not made and what alternative stories might exist, waiting to be told.

The chapter proceeds in two parts. We begin with some educational philosophies which saw the school garden as important. We then move to a ‘case’ – school gardening history in the US – to raise key questions about learning and school gardens.

School gardens, pedagogies and pedagogues

The school garden backstory often begins in the 17th century with Czech scholar John Amos Comenius, who promoted the idea of a school as a ‘garden of delight’. His wholistic imaginary of schools, teaching and curriculum (Comenius, 1907, pp. 111–112) made actual gardens an integral part of the educational experiences on offer. It is perhaps not surprising that in pre-industrial society, where kitchen gardens were a fact of life and teachers were often given land as a means of supplementing their salary (Hemenway, 1915), Comenius understood the potential of a school garden to serve multiple and harmonious purposes. He saw

no disjuncture between the purposes of providing pleasure, promoting bodily health, inviting reflection and self-examination, turning the mind and heart to God’s purposes in the world, promoting economic and cultural development, and seeking social change.

(Smith, 2018, p. 5)

Comenius argued that learning occurs through the senses. Observation, experience and perception led, he said, to retention of knowledge as well as a fresh and permanent memory of the initial event/encounter (Comenius, 1907, p. 185). And what better place to observe and experience than outside in the school garden? Gardens would, Comenius said, give students the opportunity to enjoy and reflect on the natural world, and learn how to care for its plants and animals.

Jean Jacques Rousseau agreed. He also advocated learning through the senses and everyday experiences. The premise of his educational treatise Emile (Rousseau, 1889) was that removing a child, and their tutor, from undue influences of family and the wider world, would compel the child to not only learn how to survive but also learn from how to survive. Children were intrinsically interested in learning, Rousseau suggested, provided the environment was conducive, appropriately organised by the tutor as well as Nature. Rousseau saw a garden as integral to experience-based learning:

Only twice will it be necessary for him (sic) to see a garden cultivated, seed sown, plants reared, beans sprouting, before he will desire to work in a garden himself.

(Rousseau, 1889, p. 64)

Rousseau’s ideas were widely ridiculed at the time of writing. However, his core pedagogical principles have been highly influential over time. Contemporary educators will be familiar with Rousseau’s urging of age-appropriate, discovery-led learning; the development of personal accountability through experiencing the consequences of actions taken; the importance of reason over rote memorisation; the importance of learning from life rather than from books; the value of querying authority; and the importance of physical as well as intellectual exercise.

One educator influenced by Rousseau was the Swiss pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Pestalozzi was an advocate of anschauung – impressions gathered through the senses which lead to learning and knowing (Pestalozzi, 1894). Pestalozzi argued that educators build on what children see around them, they use the familiar to teach concepts and categories with their correct names, as well as scientific and moral truths. He believed strongly in Nature as a co-teacher, and favoured domestic and everyday foci for the curriculum, hence a garden (Pestalozzi, 1889). However, unlike Rousseau’s wild child, Pestalozzi’s students were to begin their tuition in the classroom and then go out into the garden and field to see objects in their natural and changing state. Pestalozzi designed gardens for all of his schools – individual plots as well as a communal plot materialised his philosophy of interconnectedness, unity and individuality.

Pestalozzi’s one-time kindred spirit, Frederich Froebel, thought this approach too bookish. ‘Doing’ was his preferred method. Froebel thought Pestalozzi focussed too much on technical knowledge, stripping away the aesthetic and spiritual from the garden experience. Froebel was particularly interested in younger children and believed that they developed an ‘inner need’ to read and write at about seven years old. He permitted some earlier mandatory instruction but prohibited writing and reading until the child had reached the appropriate age (Brehony, 1988). Froebel saw the garden as essential to young children’s intellectual, physical and moral development.

For here man (sic) for the first time sees his work bearing fruit in an organic way, determined by the logical necessity and law – fruit which, although subject to the inner laws of natural development, depends in many ways upon his work and upon the character of his work…. if a boy (sic) has given his plants only moderate care and attention, they thrive remarkably well… the plants and flowers of the boys who attend to them with special care live in sympathy with these boys, as it were, and are particularly healthy and luxuriant.

(Froebel, 1908, pp. 111–112)

In other words, the garden reflected the moral attitudes of the child gardener.

Froebel’s approach was unpopular at the time. His political opposition to strict Prussian rule was manifest in his non-linear garden design and his experiential pedagogy; his schools were briefly banned for a short period (Herington, 1998). Nevertheless, his naming of early years education as the kindergarten (child’s garden) has become almost universal, and his influence was widespread. But the divide between Pestalozzi and Froebel – about whether there should be formal instruction prior to hands-on experience and the amount and type of instruction to be given – has continued in education more generally, as well as in relation to garden-based learning programmes.

In Great Britain, Victorian-era educators were heavily influenced by the writings of Herbert Spencer (1855, 1861). Spencer approved of Pestalozzi’s arguments for education to follow the processes of the natural world, but saw his ideas as underdeveloped and imperfectly applied. Bringing the ‘new’ science of psychology and a Darwinian lens to child development, Spencer outlined underpinning educational principles which are still widely held today – learning proceeds from the simple to the complex, thinking becomes more precise as the child matures, lessons should start from the concrete and end in the abstract. Spencer saw that formal schooling had been particularly lax in teaching the knowledge and skills necessary to advance civilisation:

That increasing acquaintance with the laws of phenomena, which has through successive ages enabled us to subjugate Nature to our need, and in these days gives the common labourer comforts which a few centuries kings could not purchase, is scarcely in any degree owed to the appointed means of instructing our youth. The vital knowledge that by which we have grown as a nation to what we are, and which now underlies our whole existence, is a knowledge that is itself taught in nooks and corners; while the ordained agencies for teaching have been mumbling little else but ideal formulas.

(Spencer, 1861, p. 25)

Spencer’s imperial mindset moved away from privileging the Biblical, to prioritising a new spirituality of materialism and science. Education was to position children to be lords over Nature and the world. The school garden became one of many sites where Victorian dame and public schools translated Spencer’s philosophy into pedagogy. Applications of Spencer’s ideas led to lessons which had children observe and experience nature as competition, as a site of predation by one species on another, as the survival of the best adapted, as a site for the advance of a ‘civilising’ imperialist nationhood.

Strong advocates for school gardens emerged in tune with the movement for universal school provision. Professor Erasmus Schwab is often credited with establishing a gardening movement in Austria (Gargano, 2007; Jewell, 1907). His writings addressed garden purposes (science, vocation, physical labour) and pedagogies as well as the realpolitik of educational change. Schwab noted disagreements about the purposes of school gardens, insufficient local expertise to design gardens for local conditions, and teachers without either the pedagogical repertoires or subject-based knowledge to design instructional garden programmes. Contemporary school reformers will recognise the challenges he discussed.

Whoever wishes to make plans for founding suitable school gardens must certainly be an idealist… but he (sic) must also possess the necessary technical knowledge required: he must know life and be acquainted with the public demands by his own inward observations and insight; he must have had intercourse with all classes of the population and must especially be acquainted with teachers, and be himself a school man, in order to be able to meet with question whether his plans can reckon upon general sympathy and furtherance.

(Schwab, 1879, p. 8)

Schwab’s rhetoric swept over the difficulties of different student populations and pressures of city and rural schools. Rather than suggesting that gardens might differ by school type, he argued that the primary and universal purpose of the school garden was to teach Natural History and Science. Students should learn about humanity’s dependence on nature and its power, and take pleasure in being in and with nature.

As the school garden movement grew, teachers themselves also wrote books about gardens. One example ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of table
• Acronyms
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Mapping the history of school gardens
• 2 Contemporary understandings of school gardens
• 3 City School establishes a garden
• 4 New School maintains an established garden
• 5 Analysing the school garden
• 6 Why garden in schools?
• Index