School Gardens: Becoming Teachers Together Within a Pedagogy of Enclosures

• In Event: 65.080 - Roundtable Session 24
  In Roundtable Session: 65.080-6 - Creating Drama Beyond Colonial Enclosures: School Gardens, Storytelling, and Dancing

Abstract

In conversation with a growing school garden movement, this paper draws on my arts-based doctoral research at a university campus teaching and learning garden to explore what it means to become teachers together with a garden. The nearly clichéd notion of the garden-as-teacher is examined through historical, conceptual (material feminist and posthumanist), and arts-based experimentation via a two-year-long site-specific installation series, Threads Sown, Grown & Given, developed in collaboration with student teachers and nonhuman participants (particularly flax, linen, spindles, and fireweed). The resulting métissage includes (a) the garden becoming a teacher, (b) student teachers becoming teachers, and (c) my own autobiographical becoming teacher/academic. Theoretical and methodological outcomes from the research are considered through the frame of a pedagogy of enclosures.

Author

• Julia Kathleen Ostertag, The University of British Columbia