What happens in the garden?

Shared by Kate Cairns

What happens in the garden? The garden is widely celebrated as an enchanted space with vast educational potential. With children’s hands in the dirt, we’re told a range of benefits will follow: from changed eating habits, to higher test scores, increased self-esteem, and greater ecological awareness. But what is lost when we assess garden pedagogies through this narrow evaluative framework? In a forthcoming article, I consider the limitations of celebrating gardens for their educational effects. This framing mobilizes particular conceptions of children (as outputs) and social change (as occurring through individual transformation). My own research with youth gardens in Toronto, Ontario, and Camden, New Jersey suggests such measures miss a great deal of the learning and labor that happen in these spaces. In an effort to think beyond effects, I call for an expanded pedagogical imagination that asks not how gardens affect young people, but how young people work together to create worlds.

Cairns, K. (2018) Beyond magic carrots: Garden pedagogies and the rhetoric of effects. Harvard Educational Review, Winter 2018 88(4), 516-537.

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