Living Soil and Pedagogy From Below: School Gardens as Poetic and Critical Texts for Learning

• In Event: A Radical, Rooted Curriculum for Climate Catastrophe: Resourcefulness, Regeneration, Connection, and Community

Abstract

The soil is at once a living community of creatures and their habitat.
- Wendell Berry, 2009

The new frontier is beneath our feet.
- Thomas Barrett, 1947

Purpose: Every person has eaten soil. This may come as a surprise to city dwellers who live sanitized lives and consider soil as “dirty,” not even to be touched. Urbanites are more accustomed to the stickiness and multitude of artificial flavors in chewing gum than with the multitude of textures and tastes offered by soil. Nevertheless, soil is often ingested, inadvertently, as microscopic soil particles adhering to fingers and food enter our guts (Landa & Feller, 2010). As a result, we are intricately connected to the food and life source right below our feet. With every bite of food, we nibble at soil’s history, biology, and culture, even as we ingest its nutrients. Soil’s sensorial memory is entwined with our bodily memory.

Perspective: The skin of the earth, soil also serves as its placenta—an autopoietic life-source. By virtue of its life-giving, life-nourishing, and life-composing qualities, soil serves not merely as a medium in which life grows. Soil is life. It is living (Hyams, 1976, Williams & Brown, 2011). For children and adolescents, there can be no better place to commune with life than below the feet on school grounds (Williams & Brown, 2011). In school learning gardens students can relate with soil, plants, food, and the nonhuman animal world. The pedagogy of school learning gardens blurs the boundaries between the human animal and nonhuman vertebrate and invertebrate animal life. Meeting soil organisms as partners in the web of life, learning gardens invite children into animal kinship at a level deeper than words. As interlocutors of nature and culture beneath our feet, learning gardens via living soil offer pathways toward organizing a pedagogy from below that seeks to unearth the poetic and critical texts for learning.

Methods, Sources, & Results: This paper presents research from a Learning Gardens partnership program between a large urban university and its local public school district at two schools (grades K-5 and 6-8). A majority of the students are low-income, recent immigrants and refugees, and English Language Learners. Using ethnographic research and interviews, their voices, as they engage with soil and learn science and other subjects in the gardens, will be presented and supplemented with photographs. A dynamic food web, living soil exposes the fallacy of mechanistic understandings of life and calls upon us to re-member ourselves as part of the biotic community (Kilindiest, 2007). As Thich Nhat Hahn says, within an interconnected world, “to be is to inter-be.” Examining a diverse sample of writing from educators and their students, we find that children involved in learning gardens are able to make this connection.

Significance: Learning gardens bring life to schools and schools to life through inviting children into relationship with the more-than-human world embodied in living soil. The new frontier for pedagogy arises from below—it is beneath our feet in the school grounds. Gardens serve as both poetic and critical texts for learning.

Author

• Dilafruz R. Williams, Portland State University