Sep. 23, 2026 Entry Slip: Thinking About Teaching & Learning Gardens

Reading today’s article, I sincerely began to reflect on the benefits of a learning garden within education. An interesting point from the reading was recognizing the garden as a co-teacher. For the entirety of our EDUC450 and EDCP342 classes, I categorized the UBC Orchard Garden solely as a location. Thus, to reconceptualize my predisposition was thought-provoking as I began considering how to integrate practices into my teachables.

One of my subject areas is English, and initially including its material felt intuitive. Specifically, the creative aspects of English allow the students to branch off to poetry as a benchmark. However, it was this realization of relying on something that comes effortlessly that I wanted to change. If learning is easy, there is no true learning as everything is already familiar. This led me to consider incorporating Indigenous ways of learning. I wanted to challenge my students by exploring land-based storytelling, encouraging them to actually situate themselves within the natural elements. They would share a specific encounter with the garden, prompting them to earnestly reflect on the history behind the land, and this could motivate higher levels of vocabulary for deeper expression.

My other teachable subject is Mathematics, and I believe a learning garden serves as the perfect space to inspire cooperation due to its intimate proximity. Mathematics, within a high school setting, is widely recognized as an individual activity. A benefit by being in the garden is that the tone switches from exclusively learning from a singular instructor to learning from each other. On the contrary, a difficult aspect may be that learning within a garden is not a normalized approach to teaching within the BC Curriculum Standards, and the students may require time to adjust. That being said, the article distinguishes a strong difference between learning within a garden, and simply transferring a classroom to a learning garden. As such, it is only by everyone actively looking for ways to learn with the garden, as opposed to just being in it, that facilitates collective learning. Moreover, Mathematics plays an integral role in this process, as students begin to see it reflected in a real-world scenario, bringing meaning to their understanding.