This morning, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture given by Dr. Dilafruz Williams. Dr. Williams is founding director of the Leadership in Ecology, Culture, and Learning program and of the Learning Gardens Laboratory at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. She also co-founded the Environmental Middle School (grades 6-8) in 1995, which has now expanded to K-8 Sunnyside Environmental School in Portland Public Schools.
These successful initiatives have been designed with the goal of addressing the ecological and cultural underpinnings of education in K-12 schools and in higher education and build strong community-school-university partnerships. How successful? The Learning Gardens concept has now taken root in a number of primary schools across the US as well as six high schools, which is mind-boggling considering the untimely and ignominious death of environmental education (known in its erstwhile avatar as EVS) as a school subject for the ICSE Board.
As the name suggests, the Learning Gardens is designed to help children/students as well as their families and communities connect to their natural roots. Our connection with soil as a living medium has been tenuous for quite some time. The program helps students learn about science, social studies, and sustainability--all of it in a place as unexpected as a garden.
One thing hit home quite forcefully for me, namely, our (read "the urbanite's") complete disconnect with the earth in our everyday lives. Most of us understand the ecological importance of nature. We see nature as a scenic backdrop on most of our travels/trips out of town and not much else. Few of us stop to think where we get our food from (the earth), what happens to the water we use (if you live in Mumbai, it ends up more or less assaulting all the aquatic life (or what's left of it) in the Arabian Sea), or exactly where the garbage disappears once we have (hopefully) put it out for the garbage truck. (I must admit that I was completely clueless about all of these things while growing up. If I had had an environmental education before I embarked on my Master's degree, it would have been an eye-opener and would have contributed immeasurably to my understanding of nature as whole.)
Ask an average person where his/her food comes from, and the answer would probably be the supermarket (if you are in the US), the farmer in the gaon (if you are in India), or something more hilarious (and completely untrue, if your average Joe is British). What most of us do not realize is that the small-time farmer too is disappearing. Slowly, but surely, being taken over the big corporations in the name of convenience, scale, and supply chain management.
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