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Originally appears in the Spring 2019 issue.
OFTEN PIGEON-HOLED as warm-weather-only spots for teaching biology, gardens offer an endless array of learning opportunities for all ages across multiple subjects all year ‘round. With some creative cross-curricular collaboration, teachers can use a garden’s primary function — growing food — as an easy hook for students, creating immediate and obvious relevance to students’ lives.
This article describes two examples of agriculture-based programming, each of which takes place in the context of a teaching farm located on-site at an outdoor education and summer camp facility. One example is a short activity designed for single-visit fourth- and fifth- graders, while the other is a year-long project designed for high school students who visit the facility throughout the year. Both activities are highly flexible and adaptable for use in other contexts.
Elementary school programming
Soil Stewardship is a 1.5-hour class that we offer to schools participating in our overnight Outdoor Education program, and it takes place at our educational farm. With a focus on healthy soil as the foundation of sustainable food production, the class draws deliberate connections between food and several Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) core ideas, helping students recognize the relevance of those core ideas to their own lives. It also offers opportunities for students to engage with the NGSS practices in a new and memorable context. Specific NGSS connections for the Soil Stewardship class and for the year-long high school project are detailed in the appendices at the end of the article.
One component of the class is an interactive demonstration called the Erosion Table, which includes a large tilted table divided into three compartments, each of which has drainage holes at the downhill end. The three compartments are all filled with the same soil, but each is topped differently: one has a layer of straw mulch; one has a living “cover crop” of peas, buckwheat, oats, and radish; and one is left bare. To perform the demonstration, students pour a significant amount of water into the uphill end of each of the three compartments, simulating an erosion event such as a heavy storm. Students then compare what happens as the water makes its way through (or over) the soil and ultimately drains into white buckets placed under the three sets of drainage holes. The bare soil will erode significantly, the soil with live plants will largely be held in place by the plants’ roots, and the soil under mulch will not noticeably erode.
In the context of the class, the erosion table activity demonstrates the importance of having a soil cover, whether living or dead, over agricultural land, and serves as a starting point for a theme revisited throughout the students’ time on the farm: that sustainable practices of human design mimic natural systems. Students see the management practices — cover crop and sheet mulch — in practice in the farm’s production field and teaching garden, and they compare the managed soil in the garden with that in the adjacent forest, illustrating the soil-building benefit of using these techniques. Students also explore how these practices fit into biodiverse food webs on the farm by identifying cover crop as potential forage food for livestock whose manure in turn increases soil fertility and by identifying mulch as a valuable habitat and food source for soil-dwelling decomposers such as earthworms, fungi, and beneficial bacteria.
The Erosion Table activity can be adapted in many ways. It can be offered as a stand-alone demonstration that is already constructed and with which students interact once, as described — a good fit for a program where students are only on-site for a limited time. Alternately, it could be expanded into a year-long inquiry-based project. This cross-disciplinary undertaking could incorporate research about agricultural land management practices; comparisons of land management practices in different regions, eras, or cultures; and the history of human land use.
This research could in turn inform students’ development of the demonstration, namely in engineering of the box, selecting and installing the soil and covers, and managing the cover crop. The project could involve creation of written instructions about how the demonstration works, it could incorporate collection and analysis of quantitative data about how much water soil can hold when managed in different ways, or it could serve as a foundation for student advocacy work around sustainable management of agricultural land. Built on an initial connection to food production, this activity has enormous — and highly flexible — potential for connecting concepts and practices of science and engineering to students’ lives. Though the initial activity was designed for a fourth- and fifth-grade class, it could be easily adapted to meet the needs of students through the middle and high school years.
High school programming
For two years, the farm served as a focal point for 40-hour courses in biology, environmental science, geology, and agricultural science, offered in partnership with the local public high school collaborative for students with severe social, emotional, and/or behavioral disorders. These students spent a full week out of each academic quarter on-site at the outdoor education facility, guided by a team of formal and informal educators, working both indoors and out, using a curriculum written to take advantage of the facility’s natural resources, while addressing NGSS standards and, in the case of the biology course, preparing students for their state-mandated standardized biology test.
The Agricultural Science class engaged with a year-long cross-disciplinary project that incorporated plant science with product development, while also addressing education frameworks in science and engineering.
Students began their school year preparing outdoor garden beds for the winter by clearing the current season’s crops, spreading compost, and laying mulch. As the weather cooled, students chose an herb or spice-blend to produce and market. They discussed their taste preferences, debated recipes, and browsed seed catalogs. They also brainstormed how to complete their project within the 9-month school year, most of which did not overlap with the region’s growing season. The students then started growing seedlings indoors, comparing how the seeds fared under different conditions: sitting on heat mats and under grow lights, or beside a sunny window.
Students transplanted some of the seedlings into a larger indoor grow system in the early spring, and transplanted others into outdoor beds as the season warmed. They compared growth rates in the indoor and outdoor systems, identifying some of the factors that may have contributed to the plants’ differences. Finally, students harvested and dried their herbs, blended their mixes, researched food labeling requirements, and created packaging, ultimately producing a fully-realized prototype. They also wrote marketing copy, drafted slogans, and even created logos. Because of state regulations around commercial food production and sales, the students did not sell their products, but they did take them home to share with their families.
Throughout this project, the students’ work was integrated with ongoing conversations and activities about many facets of sustainable food production, such as the distance that food travels to get to our plates and the benefits and drawbacks of localized and seasonal agriculture; different soil fertility management techniques, including chemical, livestock-based, and organic options; and the capacity of different biomes and ecosystems to support agriculture, and how these factors have shaped human migration, settlement, and modern agriculture patterns. Each of these topics was explored with the spice-blend project as the starting point, which offered opportunities to address an array of NGSS standards in a context in which the students were already engaged and invested.
This project can be adjusted in countless ways to fit many educational contexts and most regions’ growing seasons, and the cross-curricular connections are limitless. Students could use any combination of growing systems for comparative purposes, or they could use just one growing system. The project could include other shelf-stable processed foods, such as pickles, preserves, or dried goods. It could incorporate a comparison between production and distribution of shelf-stable food versus fresh food, and the implications of those markets for farmers, for processors, and for consumers. Students could apply mathematics skills to assess costs, set prices, identify break-even points, and explore scaling. The project could also serve as a starting point for research about the history and impact of the global spice trade, about different cultural preferences and values, or about the impacts of climate change on small-scale food production.
All of these concepts and more involve the garden and value-added food production as an integrating context, creating dynamic and relevant ways for students to engage with academic content year-‘round.
Using a garden as the starting point for curriculum development offers an incredible opportunity for creative, integrated program design that always maintains a tangible and direct connection to students’ lives. Whether working with a short, single activity or crafting a year-long multi-disciplinary project, sustainable food production remains a timely and meaningful integrating context for learners of all ages and across most subjects.
Tara Laidlaw has worked at the intersection of formal and informal education for over 10 years, addressing education frameworks in meaningful ways, using farms, forests, historic estates, and more as her “classrooms.” She holds a BA from Stanford University and an MAEd with a focus in Natural Science and Environmental Education from Hamline University.
APPENDIX A:
NGSS connections: Erosion Table activity
This activity was designed to support a number of fourth- and fifth-grade NGSS Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCIs). As a standalone activity, the erosion table demonstration directly addresses the following:
- 4-LS1-1: Plants and animals have both internal and external structures that serve various functions in growth, survival, behavior, and reproduction;
- 4-ESS2-1: Rainfall helps to shape the land and affects the types of living things found in a region. Water, ice, wind, living organisms, and gravity break rocks, soils, and sediments into smaller particles and move them around;
- 4-ESS2-1: Living things affect the physical characteristics of their regions;
- 4-ESS3-2: A variety of hazards result from natural processes. Humans cannot eliminate the hazards but can take steps to reduce their impacts; and
- 3-5-ETS1-3: Different solutions need to be tested in order to determine which of them best solves the problem, given the criteria and the constraints.
In the context of the Soil Stewardship class — incorporated with discussion and exploration of biodiversity, food webs, and human impact in a farm setting — the Erosion Table also supports the following:
- 5-LS2-1: Decomposition eventually restores (recycles) some materials back to the soil… A healthy ecosystem is one in which multiple species of different types are each able to meet their needs in a relatively stable web of life;
- 5-LS2-1: Matter cycles between the air and soil and among plants, animals, and microbes as these organisms live and die; and
- 5-ESS3-1: Human activities in agriculture, industry, and everyday life have had major effects on the land, vegetation, streams, ocean, air, and even outer space. But individuals and communities are doing things to help protect Earth’s resources and environments.
The demonstration also offers students a chance to engage with some of the NGSS Science and Engineering Practices, including these:
- asking questions
- analyzing and interpreting data
- constructing explanations
- engaging in argument from evidence
Finally, the activity connects to these of the NGSS Crosscutting Concepts:
- energy and matter
- stability and change
- cause and effect
APPENDIX B:
NGSS connections: Year-long activity
The NGSS DCIs addressed by this fully integrated project included, but were not limited to the following:
- HS-LS2-1: Ecosystems have carrying capacities, which are limits to the numbers of organisms and populations they can support. These limits result from such factors as the availability of living and nonliving resources and from such challenges as predation, competition, and disease;
- HS-LS4-6: Humans depend on the living world for the resources and other benefits provided by biodiversity. But human activity is also having adverse impacts on biodiversity through overpopulation, overexploitation, habitat destruction, pollution, introduction of invasive species, and climate change;
- HS-ESS3-2: All forms of energy production and other resource extraction have associated economic, social, environmental, and geopolitical costs and risks as well as benefits;
- HS-ESS3-3: The sustainability of human societies and the biodiversity that supports them requires responsible management of natural resources;
- HS-ETS1-1: Humanity faces major global challenges today, such as the need for supplies of clean water and food… which can be addressed through engineering. These global challenges also may have manifestations in local communities; and
- HS-ETS1-3: When evaluating solutions, it is important to take into account a range of constraints, including cost, safety, reliability, and aesthetics, and to consider social, cultural, and environmental impacts.