The Edible Schoolyard/A Night in the Global Village

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This is a very interesting and creative approach to learning. The concept started by Alice Water reconnects students to how they get their food. It incorporates nutrition and agriculture, science and chemistry allowing students to experience an all encompassing classroom in nature. The scene is Martin Luther Middle School in Berkley California where students have cleared a parking lot and made a garden. They learned every aspect of gardening and preparing the food that they grew. They also learned the concept of composting to enrich the soil and make it better for planting. Students get a chance to improve their school, learn and be proud of what they are doing. Most importantly they are having fun and don't even realize that they are learning. I think that is when a subject really makes an impact on the student.

This project is teaching students to appreciate and respect the earth and how important it is to protect the environment that sustains us as humans. The students become aware of the ecosystem and how everything works together to benefit everything else. In this way a student can learn to appreciate what the earth has to offer and what it takes to keep it environmentally safe. This realization can be translating in their own lives. They can see what an individual can do. Students learn how the ecosystem effects businesses and their very way of life. They get a chance to see how everything is effected by their actions, that's a hard lesson to try to teach in the classroom.

I would love to teach sustainability through hands own activities such as the Edible Schoolyard. It is a way to bring a concept to life and have students become passionate about a subject. That is an invaluable tool of teaching. Anytime a teacher can bring a subject to life, to make it real for their students then they will have made an impression on those students. Some students will never have a chance anywhere else to experience gardening and learn how our food gets to the table.

A Night in the Global Village is a great idea too. At the Rocky Mt. School of Expeditionary Learning, students have a chance to experience poverty and hunger in real life situations. The students at the school go to a special camp at the Heifer Ranch in Arizona to stay in a village created for them there. The students are split into groups representing impoverished countries with very little or no resources. They spend the night in a village constructed by the school and have to learn to negotiate for the things they need to survive. Students learn on a global scale how hunger and poverty affects relationships with other countries. Some of the groups had nothing but, the group from Guatemala had water, the most important resource, and therefor they had the power. Students got the chance to see how those with resources could demand that those without do things to get something they need. They learned how those without are subject to control by those that do have things. This podcast shows how conditions can affect relationships globally.

This is a concept that is not easily understood in a classroom. They need to experience some of the hardships to understand how someone could become desperate and in need for things just to survive and are willing to do what it takes to get them. Students learn how to work together to survive out of necessity. They don't have the luxury of being concerned with just their individual comfort.

I think that the village is a great idea for students to experience walking in someone's shoes. You can read about this but the experience brings it alive for you as a student in a way a book can not.