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The Force of Gardening: Investigating Children's Learning in a Food Garden

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2015

Monica Green  and
Iris Duhn
Monica Green*
Affiliation:
School of Education, Faculty of Education and Arts, Federation University, Churchill, VictoriaAustralia
Iris Duhn
Affiliation:
Faculty of Education, Monash University, MelbourneAustralia
*
Address for correspondence: Monica Green, School of Education, Faculty of Education and Arts, Federation University, Gippsland Campus, Churchill VIC 3842, Australia. Email: monica.green@federation.edu.au
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Abstract

School gardens are becoming increasingly recognised as important sites for learning and for bringing children into relationship with food. Despite the well-known educational and health benefits of gardening, children's interactions with the non-human entities and forces within garden surroundings are less understood and examined in the wider garden literature. Using a relational materialist approach (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010) that considers the material artefacts that constitute a learning environment, this article examines children's interactions with the animate and inanimate life forces through three specific garden photographs. The photos belong to data derived from a study that examined food, ecology and design pedagogies in three Australian primary schools. This paper argues that children's interactions with the non-human materialities of a garden are a vital dimension of gardening practice. The agential powers of gardens have great capacity to mobilise and inform children's inhabitation of food gardens.

Keywords

school food gardenschildreninteractionintra-actionnew materialism
Type
Feature Articles
Information
Australian Journal of Environmental Education , Volume 31 , Special Issue 1: Putting Food on the Table , July 2015 , pp. 60 - 73
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2015 

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