Introduction Pt. II
Among the early 2000s, Michelle Obama’s Healthy Schools movement, the No Child Left Inside
(NCLI) initiative and countless other programs surfaced and pressed our educators and legislators to stuff our schoolyards with various green-spaces. The primary objectives that initially motivated most of the creation of gardens and place-based education interventions in schools were obesity and food security. Following soon after were programs which opposed narrow curriculum that restricted children and encouraged stronger community building, social or personal growth and an increased positive environmental attitude or empathy. This information stems from the deep analysis on the impact of garden-based learning on academic outcomes in schools written by Dliafruz R. Williams and Scott P. Dixon.
I’m hoping your head is spinning just as much as mine was once I finished the read, so I know what you’re thinking:
we are comparing every fruit in the book here.
(If you weren’t thinking that, just nod and lie to me that you were).
I know that I personally always had a positive perspective towards gardens in schools, but even I did not know how they directly could change the livelihoods of adolescents. After delving further into existing literature, it seems that many studies on the impacts of these implemented garden-scapes halted post-2010 era. Although these and other studies demonstrate the positive impact of nature on the cognitive development or functioning of humans...
these studies don’t measure the magnitude of how impactful they are.
In order to create more comprehensive, logical groups, I separated these studies of garden and landscape interventions in schools in the United States by their unit of measurement. They tended to measure one of three things: critical thinking and decision-making skills, test scores, and food security.
Now, these metrics are all quite different, and how do we determine which one actually suggests the most ‘success’ of a program? Which characteristic is most important in the scope of our young demographics’ health and happiness?
Despite the evidence suggesting that gardens may promote pro-environmental behavior, studies of the effects of school gardens on environmental attitudes, health, and community building have varied objectives and metrics.
Because of this, it is difficult to state conclusively what the effects are regarding long-term effects on cognitive health or environmental attitudes.
The remaining posts in this blog-series will take a critical approach to three separate case studies, each of which measured ‘success’ in terms of critical thinking and decision-making skills, test scores, and food security respectively. Within each analysis, I will provide strengths and weaknesses of each program, culminating in a final conclusion suggesting how the optimal characteristics of each program could be used to go forward and inform new garden-curriculum construction.
Williams, Dilafruz R., and P. Scott Dixon. “Impact of Garden-Based Learning on Academic Outcomes in Schools: Synthesis of Research Between 1990 and 2010.” Review of Educational Research, vol. 83, no. 2, June 2013, pp. 211–235.