I am excited to announce that after a long delay, my Peace Jammers were finally able to break ground last week and plant their first crops. WoHoo!
Seems like such irony that it would happen during my gaming class where as my introduction to gaming was via the game Farmville. I have become quite the farmer and learned a lot of skills for both the farm and for the classroom. Check out my Farmville review as a humorous introduction to farming before viewing my students doing the REAL hard work on our urban garden.
This month's post is all about reflection: Looking back to move forward.
There are four specific components that we are supposed to address here regarding our AR work up to this point, which is considered Cycle 2. I am glad we have progressed to this point in the calendar year although it the unpredictable weather has made it quite challenging to grow an outdoor garden. We are well on our way no and sort of like a metaphor, the spring weather came and the brought new life and warmth, just like the timing in the school year whereas we have had a similar reaction to in that the state test is here and we have more time in the school day to work on our project. With all that said, we still have much to do. However, there is a saying that goes," You don't have to do it perfect, just get it started!". I think we are on the right path...
1. Measurement Tools: We used community questionnaires, surveys, brainstorming sessions, Peace Jam curriculum tools to come up learn about self, our community (taking a community walk to survey the area and see what 'needs' were evident), held a parent night so that they could come see what we were up to and voice their thoughts and ideas about student community involvement and areas of impact. The students, themselves, created a list of community projects based on feedback and own ideas and held a vote to narrow it down to one that seemed to cover multiple areas, like interest, profitability, connection to curriculum and Ga. Performance Standards for science, math, social studies (Ga. history), language arts, and civics (covered in the Peace Jam curriculum, which lines up with the state standards).
We developed an online survey to gain feedback about the chosen project (urban garden on school grounds) and to forecast it's impact on the student's learning and community health and nutritional education.
2.Data Synthesis from Cycle 1 and 2:
Being that we did not get a chance to actually start planting the garden, we redirected our focus to planning the garden, and devising a plan to partner with community organizations to learn how and create this urban garden and project the ways that our community would benefit from it. The literature search showed that service learning projects do have significant impact on student's academic, social and civic advancement over time. The students have continued to be dedicated to the project and willing to be fluid and flexible with the schedule changes due to school priorities and weather. They have taken on leadership roles and sought out areas of the curriculum that pertain to some part of the project. They have quickly taken over the responsibility of running the weekly meetings and studying the Peace Jam materials, as well as doing any research that needed to happen for the next steps while waiting to plant.
They have continued to show their resilience and leadership abilities from week to week.
Cycle 1 was more about setting up and determining the focus with the data and info recovered. Cycle 2 was focused on the implementation of the physical garden. Again, due to the weather and school calendar, the garden planting was postponed until the coming week. What did happen was the final connection with the Urban Farmer Assoc., a site visit from the farmer to teach the basics of an urban garden, purchase of seed for our chosen plants (peanuts, sweet potatoes and onions) and assignment of garden duties. These crops are easy to grow without alot of care, can continue to grow during the summer, will produce a quick return and are well liked in the community. We have gotten committed partnership with Hands On Atlanta, The Federation of Farming Co-op and the likes to provide us with gardening tools, seed, and information so that the students will be well versed in how to carry the plan from start to finish. This also sets us up to start next school year off with harvesting and repeat planting of crops for the Fall.
3. Learner-Researcher Response: As stated before, the learner (student) has truly taken this on as their own and the community, both inside the school and the neighborhood have given positive feedback and support. The students came up with the idea of selling stock in the garden where for a nominal fee, faculty can receive a return in the form of produce grown on their particular plots (determined by shares). This not only will teach them math, commerce and public speaking, but will boost their confidence as they will be running their own enterprise/business. The hope is that they will learn the true value of money and will adjust their personal abilities to handle situations and increase their confidence in those skills. The only community responses thus far are from the partners showing their support and some people wondering how they can give support and when will they expect to see the first products from the garden.
Me and my students are excited about things to come from this garden as it has been a long time in the making. I never would have figured it would take this long to get going but at least we have shown persistance and have made progress as well as set in place the foundation for the fall. I can only predict that the kids will have a wonderful garden full of produce to share over the summer! Looking forward to it!
