Science, Standards, and Nostalgia: How Teachers Make Sense of a School Garden Program

• In Event: Teacher and Teacher Education Research in Environmental Education

Abstract

This phenomenological study explores how teachers make sense of a school garden program. In each of three cases, teachers learned to negotiate material and curricular constraints driven by state testing and content standards. In addition, teachers’ significant life experiences (SLE) outdoors (Chawla, 1998; Tanner, 1980) and childhood nostalgia combined with observations of student’s classroom behavior to construct a particular view of students that functioned as a strong rationale for garden inclusion.

Author

• Simon N. Jorgenson, University of Cincinnati