The purpose of Garden Mosaics, as stated on the website, is to connect youth and elders to investigate the mosaic of plants, people, and cultures in gardens, to learn about science, and to act together to enhance their community. The website goes on to say that the initial idea for Garden Mosaics came from a realization that community gardens, because of their unusual blend of people, cultures, plants, and activism, offer unique sites for youth education within a community setting. Erickson discusses the importance of learning within communities of practice (p. 303), and I feel that this sort of organization would provide students with exposure to differing cultures and subcultures, thus enabling them to learn more about the world around them. I chose this website to analyze because it puts gardening into a global perspective, something that I feel is truly amazing. As a fourth generation gardener, I have spent a lot of time discussing gardening techniques and plants with other gardeners, especially my mother and grandfather, and to have the opportunity to learn about gardens around the world fascinates me.
Garden Mosaics, in focusing on the active nature of children, is clearly employing a constructivist model of learning. In their chapter on contemporary learning theories, Oakes and Lipton write that learning is much less a process of passively accepting knowledge than it is a process of selecting and transforming experiences to serve new information needs (p. 73). The program focuses on how new situations and information can affect what children already know, and how they can apply what they already know to novel situations; in this case, gardening.
One of the more fascinating aspects of the website is the i*m*science feature. There are four i*m*science investigations, but for the purposes of this assignment I will focus on Gardener Story, in which participants develop an oral history and take photographs illustrating a gardener’s planting practices and “planting tips,” and the connections between those practices and the gardener’s culture. As of this writing, participants had added stories from gardeners living in the United States, India, Russia, South Africa, and Spain.
Adelaide Malogwe at the Mountain of Hope.
A poignant example of one gardener’s story is that of the Mountain of Hope Garden in Johannesburg, South Africa, and its gardener, Adelaide Malogwe. In her interview, Adelaide discusses how culture has influenced the gardening techniques used at the Mountain of Hope Garden, and how the local community has reacted to the establishment of the garden. In using interviews of gardeners from all over the world, Garden Mosaics is attempting to break down cultural barriers through the study of science, and in particular, gardening. Garden Mosaics acknowledges that cultural differences exist, as posited by Tabak, and goes on to highlight the benefits of understanding and appreciating and learning from those differences. I believe that this program follows the Curricular Multicultural Science Education approach, in that it is including the perspectives of a wide range of cultures on the science of gardening (p. 34).
Student gardeners from the Green Teen Community Garden.
In addition to Gardener’s Story, there is also the Action Projects database, in which students post stories about how they helped gardeners and their communities. Action Projects allows students to go out and work with a gardener, then share the story of their experience with others. In her discussion of the dismantling of the narrative, author Sarah Michaels writes that elaborated narrative is a restricted genre in most U.S. Classrooms, decreasing inversely with grade level (p. 303). Action Projects allows students to write about their experiences in a personal, story-telling manner that is both interesting and informative, and is based on what they learned while working in the garden.
I would love to use this website in my classroom activities. I believe that it is an excellent way for students to learn about world cultures and also get involved in their own communities. Science teachers in particular may find useful information and activities for their students, I particularly enjoyed the Science Pages section, which provides information on the science behind gardening in both English and Spanish.
Sources:
Erickson, F. (2002). Culture and human development. Human Development, 45, 303.
Michaels, Sarah. (1991) The Dismantling of the narrative. The Literacies Institute. 303.
Oakes, J. & Lipton, M. (2006). Teaching to change the world. New York: MacGraw Hill.
Tabak, I. (2005). Are disciplinary distinctions pertinent to multicultural education?: A view from science. Multicultural Perspectives, 7 (4), 34.
