Connecting Resource Infrastructures: Project Stonehurst
Project Stonehurst is the brainchild of Mr. Bohland at Stonehurst Elementary. He connects to The California School Garden Network through Alice Debbaudt, a garden specialist for the Los Angeles Unified School District. Garden Specialists visit schools to share their expertise and experience. They also manage resources: redistributing things like seeds, seedlings, soil and mulch to other schools.
I met Alice when I attended a California School Garden meeting. I offered seedlings and we exchanged contact information. As part of Alice's professional and personal interests, she wants to involve communities in school gardens. The local community of residents, the school community of parents, teachers and students, and the educational community of schools.
Alice, Mr. Bohland and the California School Garden Network want children to grow with the garden program. The benefits of experiential learning are well documented.
How can a school garden provide a continuum for experiential learning? Maintaining it at the same school as children progress through the grades is one thing. Connecting local elementary feeder schools to Mount Gleason Middle School is a more complicated undertaking, one that can have bureaucratic repercussions that are out of scale with the simple things that need to be done. That's one reason Alice was instrumental in creating Farming's Future, she wants children to grow with gardens, to reap as many experiential learning benefits as they can from them. Farming's Future was created to supplement existing programs, to fill in gaps within and between infrastructures.
What exactly is this experiential learning I keep talking about? It's learning by doing, rather than memorization or theory. As soon as I told Mr Bohland about World Food Corps Seedbank I could see that he was thinking about it and processing it from an educator's point of view. He had that look in his eyes of shuffling and sorting, he immediately came up with a list of subjects and disciplines that WFCS could have relevance for, "art, social sciences, history, economics, geography" and so on. Students could transfer knowledge gained through hands-on learning to other subjects and to real life.
Mr Bohland, Alice and I had a brainstorming session. These are my notes from the session, ideas we threw around and tried to help each other resolve. I'm sharing these notes as an open source of information on how things develop, how things work, they are not official statements or official plans of action. My primary interest for this blog is to share information with my professional network. It saves me a lot of time playing catch up when we meet and it's a way of sharing ideas with them and framing information into narratives. It really is not a general interest blog.
Mr. Bohland's school garden is used as an experimental lab for testing seeds and plants. It's also a seedling prep and dispatch point. He has more resources than most school gardens and he wants them to be used efficiently. We know that it's Alice's job to facilitate communication and resource sharing between schools; they work together on a schedule.
There's a big pile of soil in front of Mr. Bohland's classroom, "Project Stonehurst" is born. It will be used as a teaching tool for soil science. Alice will also use extra soil to experiment with different mixtures for a variety of plants for applications at different school gardens.
As Mr. Bohland, Alice and summed up our brainstorming session it was obvious to all of us that a program that serves as a nexus for humanitarian aid, greening of degraded land, furthering scientific research and education through friendship has enormous pedagogical benefits.
I'm finding that such a program can be so elegantly nested into existing educational objectives that quite a bit of my work as a coordinator is collaborative and feels intuitive.
