Term
Summer 2024
Capstone
Capstone Project
Degree Name
<-- Please Select One -->
Facilitator(s)
Trish Harvey
Content Expert
Kirsten Saylor
Abstract
School and community gardens have a rich history from the late 19th Century to the present, which includes the voices of Agassiz, Greene, Dewey, Washington Carver, Du Bois, and Montessori. This history spans the periods of school gardens from ‘nature study,’ the School Garden Army, Victory Gardens, the Tbilisi Declaration, and Garden-based learning. The purpose of this capstone project was to answer the following question: What are the individual lessons needed in a curriculum to support and connect experiential school and community garden programs for K-2 youth to serve as effective educational tools for environmental literacy and food systems awareness? The literature reviewed included school and community garden content highlighting experiential learning in an elementary setting, focusing on building awareness of environmental literacy and food systems. The project created is a designed school garden curriculum intended for the use of K-2 formal and informal educators with the intent of connecting Kolb’s experiential learning theory, Minnesota Department of Education standards, and the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning framework by using Wiggins and McTighe's curriculum framework, The Understanding by Design Guide to Creating High-Quality Units. The goal of the project is to help alleviate the issues of educators lacking the time, resources, and lack of connection to academic standards to gardening with students in the elementary school setting to help students build environmental literacy, social and emotional skills, and the awareness of the origins of food through the use of hands-on, experiential learning.
Project Type
Curriculum
Keywords
Curriculum, Environmental Studies, School Gardens
Recommended Citation
De Leeuw, Adam, "Experiential Gardening for Environmental Literacy and Food Systems Awareness" (2024). School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects. 1070.
https://digitalcommons.hamline.edu/hse_cp/1070
dc_type
text
dc_publisher
DigitalCommons@Hamline
dc_format
application/pdf
dc_source
School of Education Student Capstone Projects