Soil to Sustainability: School Gardens as a Pedagogical Approach for Promoting Experiential Learning in Science and Environmental Education in K-12 Canadian Schools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
School gardens are cultivated areas near or around schools that are mainly cared for by students, teachers, and volunteers. School gardens produce vegetables and fruits, ornamental plants, and small-scale staple food while incorporating experiential learning and problem-solving activities. Research has shown the potential of school gardens in improving students’ academic performance, dietary preferences, well-being, and physical activity. Gardening promotes students’ leadership and lifelong learning skills, especially when integrated into the community. Yet, there remains relatively little evidence of the processes in which gardens provide grounds for transformative environmental learning as well as factors that favor school garden integration and sustainability. This integrated-article dissertation explores the role of school gardens as an instructional setting for environmental education (EE) through the following research questions: 1. What are the pedagogical approaches afforded by school gardens to teach EE in elementary schools? 2. Does participating in a school garden influence elementary students’ conceptualization of environmental topics? 3. What effect, if any, do school gardens have on high school students’ positive youth development, social justice awareness, and community building skills? 4. What are the initial and advanced stages of school–community partnership for school gardens’ establishment, community integration, and sustainability? 5. What administrative support structures are needed for school gardens to succeed? This exploratory study employed a mixed-methods approach, specifically a case study method. The setting for this case study was an urban elementary school and a high school in Ontario, Canada. Participants included students, their teachers, principals, garden coordinators, and garden volunteers. The data sources included semi-structured interviews, survey responses, and school garden observation. Findings show the promising impact of the school garden on students’ environmental learning and stewardship, positive youth development, community building skills, and social justice awareness. This research advances knowledge about the role of school-community partnerships in the context of school gardens and highlights the domains of administrators’ support for teachers to integrate gardens in their teaching. Thus, this study aims to encourage the large-scale adoption of school gardens as agents of change in EE and to inspire educators and administrators to green their school grounds.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".