Opening a Space of/for Curriculum, or, The Learning Garden as Context and Content for Difference in Mathematics Education

• In Event: 34.078 - Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: 34.078-3 - The Transdisciplinary Nature of Mathematics Education

Abstract

The late Ted Aoki playfully identified curriculum as a “weasel word,” one that eludes definition, its slipperiness not allowing for it to be pinned down to any one universal meaning (Aoki, 1993). Instead, curriculum resists being framed by a transcendental signified, a singular known. It is inclusive of all learning contents and contexts; it extends and interacts rhizomatically with contents and contexts and without boundaries. Related, the curricular space, that rich space for learning and of learning, is similarly unbounded and endlessly open and interactive. This openness pushes beyond the four walls of the classroom, disrupting and dismantling the very structure of modern understandings of a curriculum that is framed by disciplines and disciplinary spaces.

The learning garden, a common feature of many school grounds and a place for engagement with the environment and within environmental education, grows a space, a space beyond, for such multidisciplinary curricular possibilities (see, for example, Gaylie, 2009, 2011; Williams & Brown, 2012). As both content and context, the garden allows for difference to be recognized and realized in the planned and lived curriculum of learners of all ages and this is particularly true for early years and elementary school students. Informed by the intersecting discourses in garden-based pedagogies, participatory research (Hart, 1997; Kemmis & McTaggart, 2005), and poststructuralism and deconstruction (see, for example, Cherryholmes, 1988; Derrida, 1997; Peters & Burbules, 2004), this paper weaves together the multiple yet inextricably linked garden-based curricular moments of early years and elementary mathematics learning in the garden.

The data draws from a year long participatory action research project focused on the school garden experience that was done with an urban Ontario public elementary school. In the project, grade six students participated as researchers in all stages of the process, from developing research questions to planning and conducting data collection and thematic analysis to dissemination of findings. In this paper, and through shared curricular vignettes, students’ organic and situated explorations of number sense and numeration, measurement, geometry and spatial sense, patterns and algebra, and data management and probability in the garden are explored and rhizomatic mathematical connections are traced.

The paper contributes importantly to the extant literature on school garden-based curriculum and instruction as it uniquely explores the possibilities for engagement with and in mathematical thinking and being in an inherently multidisciplinary and organic context. Practically, it opens up a space for teaching and learning that actively and organically digs into rich mathematical concepts and processes.

Author

• Susan Jagger, Ryerson University