A Case Study: Learning Gardens in an Urban Indigenous Community: Expanding the Scope of Learning

Abstract

Gardens and learning in gardens are increasingly a focus in education, restoration, and community development. In this chapter I consider gardens and the opportunities for learning they afford from an expansive view of culture, learning and socio-historical practice. At their core, gardens are broadly about the cultivation of plants and land, however, gardening reflects complex variations, goals, and values affording various forms of identity and meaning. Indeed throughout history human communities have cultivated and harvested plants for food, for medicine, for aesthetics, for material resources, and much more. The specifics of these practices have evolved and shifted over time and varied across cultural communities, however, regardless of their specific form gardening practices are foundational reflective of the relations between humans and the natural world. The rise of learning gardens is perhaps a resilient response and remembering given the erosion of people from land that has emerged in the technologically saturated twentieth century. Given this expanded view of gardens in human communities and the present socio-historical dynamics, what might the possibilities for learning gardens be? What opportunities for learning do learning gardens afford? What are the variations in learning gardens? How do the particulars of gardens (their design, their goals, the plants grown, the programs and practices associated with them) impact learning? Largely, the answers to these questions are unknown or under-explored.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under DRL grant numbers 0815020, 1109210 and 1114530.