Dilafruz R. Williams

Impact of Garden-Based Learning on Academic Outcomes in Schools Synthesis of Research Between 1990 and 2010

What is the impact of garden-based learning on academic outcomes in schools? To address this question, findings across 152 articles (1990–2010) were analyzed resulting in 48 studies that met the inclusion criteria for this synthesis. A review template with operational coding framework was developed. The synthesis results showed a preponderance of positive impacts on direct academic outcomes with the highest positive impact for science followed by math and language arts. Indirect academic outcomes were also measured with social development surfacing most frequently and positively. These results were consistent across programs, student samples, and school types and within the disparate research methodologies used. However, a common issue was lack of research rigor as there were troubling issues with incomplete descriptions of methodological procedures in general and sampling techniques and validity in particular. Recommendations for more systematic and rigorous research are provided to parallel the growing garden-based education movement.

Sustainability Education's Gift: Learning Patterns and Relationships.

The crisis of sustainability can be linked to the traditional forms of schooling driven by mechanistic and technocratic worldviews. Progressing to a more sustainable world requires a fundamental shift in the framework of formal education—its structure, content and process—to include principles of systems thinking and holistic learning. A case study from the United States draws upon the Learning Gardens model in Portland, Oregon, where students in kindergarten through eighth grades are learning to grow, harvest and cook food based within a curricular and instructional framework that is multicultural, interdisciplinary, intergenerational and multisensory. Students’ writings reflect that they are learning in patterns and relationships a critical aspect of sustainability educations gift.

Building Capacity for Civic Engagement at Portland State University: A Comprehensive Approach

Almost a decade ago, Portland State University (PSU) launched a significant initiative of comprehensive institutional transformation.3 PSU aligned its curricula, its undergraduate and graduate academic programs, its scholarship and research, and its collaborative community outreach to reflect its commitment to a newly-defined “urban” mission that placed student learning and student experience at the core of the educational enterprise. Located in the heart of downtown Portland, PSU has taken seriously its charge to be in and of the city and the metropolitan region. Its motto, Let Knowledge Serve the City, is visibly embossed on a sky bridge symbolically capturing its commitment to the communities of which it is a part. In Fall 2000, a new year-long series entitled “Great City: Great University” was sponsored by the Office of Academic Affairs to engage faculty and community alike in civic discourse by taking stock of our common purpose and what we aspire to become.

Ecological Education: Extending the Definition of Environmental Education

Except in small measure, environmental education in the United States has not yet challenged the status quo of Western notions of progress or monoculturalism, or recognized that moving through the environmental crisis may require significant shifts in generally unquestioned cultural attitudes and beliefs. In the U.S., environmental education has instead tended to focus on information regarding environmental problems and to explore topics such as endangered species, global climate change, or the water quality of local streams and rivers. Even this has become a source of controversy in the United States since the mid-1990s as a coalition of right-wing organizations has mounted a well-coordinated political campaign charging environmental educators with bias and a failure to present both sides of controversial issues (Sanera & Shaw 1996, Independent Commission on Environmental Education 1997). Despite this, we believe that if environmental education is to live up to its promise as a vehicle for developing a citizenry capable of making wise decisions about the impact of human activities on the environment, examining and altering fundamental cultural beliefs and practices that are contributing to the degradation of the planets natural systems will be imperative. We have chosen to call this extended form of environmental education ecological education . For us, ecological education connotes an emphasis on the inescapable embeddedness of human beings in natural settings and the responsibilities that arise from this relationship. Rather than seeing nature as other—a set of phenomena capable of being manipulated like parts of a machine—the practice of ecological education requires viewing human beings as one part of the natural world and human cultures as an outgrowth of interactions between our species and particular places. We believe that the development of sustainable cultures will in fact require widespread acceptance of a relationship between humans and the earth grounded in moral sentiments that arise from the willingness to care. As Indian physicist and ecofeminist Vandana Shiva writes, the term ‘sustainability’ implies the ability and willingness ‘to support, bear weight of, hold up, enable to last out, give strength to, endure without giving way’ (Shiva 1992, p. 191).