In the second part of her guest post on outdoor learning and ‘Garden as Co-Teacher’, Dr. Susan Gerofsky talks about some examples of the work being done at the UBC Orchard Garden  and allies across the Lower Mainland and the world to advance gardens and outdoor spaces as sites of learning and inquiry.

As outdoor classrooms, gardens are an interesting mixture of human design and natural, growing and living things. There are many decisions to make about what we want to control (weeds? pathways? benches? soil amendment? planting patterns and choices of what to plant?) and what we will let grow as it will (edible and other wild plants? worms? insects, birds and animals that find a home in the garden? people who are drawn to spend time in the garden?) Gardening requires special skills that many adults and kids have lost touch with, even in rural areas: planting, mulching, thinning, weeding, watering, harvesting, pruning, grafting, crop rotation, companion planting, composting, cover cropping, beekeeping skills and much more. Learning how to garden and how to grow food – even how to recognize the plants we depend on for food – is already a very important area of life skills learning for many students and teachers.

Even when we think about more typical school curricular learning in subjects like math, art, language arts, science and social studies, the garden can be both a place to learn and a co-teacher. In my work with the student-led UBC Orchard Garden over the past ten years, I have been a member of a team developing school subject learning resources for the garden. We have experimented and field tested garden-based lessons for K-12 classes in just about every school subject area, and have exchanged ideas with like-minded colleagues in other parts of Canada and the US, Sweden, the UK, Ghana, Afghanistan, Turkey, Micronesia and Australia, among other places. A school garden offers opportunities to teach and learn in all curricular areas – for example:

• social studies (learning about historical Chinese-Musqueam cultural contacts through a traditional Chinese Market Garden; growing, threshing and grinding wheat and baking bread as medieval farmers did; learning about traditional plant-based foods and medicines in collaboration with First Nations teachers)

• language arts and drama (ecopoetry walks; writing and performing garden-based plays, stories and operas)

• science (tracking the annual course of the sun with 6-month pinhole cameras; learning about plant growth and ecosystems)

• math (experimenting with body-based measurement and estimation in planting garden plots; building hyperboloid garden gates; exploring fractal plant patterns and Fibonacci sequences)

• foods and textiles (growing herbs, vegetables and berries for cooking; growing and foraging fibre and dye plants to be used in weaving, knitting and braiding)

• music (growing plants to create musical instruments; listening to the sounds of the human and more-than-human world in the garden, and creating wind-based and place-specific musical compositions)

Working with hundreds of teacher candidates and experienced teachers each year, the Orchard Garden team is now preparing a website and book to share ideas through the Cultivating Learning Network.

Many wonderful groups are doing related and collaborative work on garden-based learning for all ages in Vancouver: EartHand Gleaners, the Means of Production Garden, Uncle Hoonki’s Fabulous Horn Shop, Intergenerational Landed Learning on the UBC Farm, Roots on the Roof, the Environmental Youth Alliance, SPEC, the Stanley Park Ecology Society, Think&Eat Green@Schools, Fresh Roots Organics, Hives for Humanity, Sole Food, Village Vancouver, CoDesign, the Maple Ridge Environmental School and many others. I encourage you to consider getting involved in getting kids and adults outdoors, learning and teaching just about any topic you can imagine, in collaboration with a garden!

Dr. Susan Gerofsky is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at UBC and a member of the Board of EartHand Gleaners Society.

The premise of EartHand is that education is one of the keys to sparking social shifts toward a sustainable society.  EartHand’s board member Dr. Susan Gerofsky is deeply engaged in ecologically-based pedagogy in her work at the UBC Orchard Garden, and in this first of a two-part guest post she reflects on conventional classrooms and introduces the potential of an outdoor classroom to be a “co-teacher.”

It’s January, and it’s back-to-school time. For most teachers and learners, school is closely associated with the built environment of traditional classrooms: four square walls, rows of desks, blackboards and whiteboards, projectors and screens, banks of fluorescent lights. The indoor classroom provides a warm, dry, well-lit place to be on a cold, rainy day, and is planned to offer ergonomic support for individual student learning activities. It is also a product of the industrial age, designed so that a large group of students may be controlled in their movements and regulated by a single teacher, and so that efficiency, punctuality and quiet industriousness at individual work stations are instilled in young learners. These qualities were thought to be valuable for a population preparing for assembly line work (or its white collar equivalents), but they may not be the only goals that are helpful for kids in our contemporary, rapidly changing world.

What about the idea of getting outside the four walls of a traditional classroom to learn? What might an outdoor classroom be like? At first, people often think of an outdoor classroom as simply an indoor classroom transposed to the outside: an outdoor amphitheatre with rows or banks of seats and desks, outdoor whiteboards, projector and screen, electrical outlets, and a roof to keep the rain off. But an outdoor classroom does not have to be an echo of the stereotypical indoor classroom. Outdoor classrooms can contribute in new ways to kids’ learning when a more naturalized ecosystem is respected as a co-teacher, and where learners get the chance to move, explore, listen and observe a world where everything is alive.

Gardens and other outdoor classrooms offer the simple but increasingly rare experience of being outdoors, in all kinds of weather, observing the cycles of the sun and rain, feeling the texture of the soil, smelling the air, noticing the shapes and patterns of plants in an ecosystem, getting ‘up close’ with bees, worms and birds and learning about their ways. Many people have very little time outdoors, and generations of children may be growing up with ‘nature deficit disorder’ (as Richard Louv named it in his book, Last Child in the Woods). Spending time in the living world outdoors has been shown to help people relax, experience greater physical and mental health and well-being, and feel gratitude and empathy through a sense of connectedness with all living things. This is a very important kind of learning too.

A beach, garden, forest, park, prairie, mountainside, marsh or shoreline – all kinds of naturalized places can be taken as outdoor classrooms, where students can learn in and from living systems. Some of these places are more or less human-influenced, others more wild or feral. No outdoor classroom will be completely ‘natural’ (i.e. an other-than-human space), and it is certainly helpful to think about human needs in these outdoors classrooms: ways to draw, write and read outdoors; places to warm up or shelter from inclement weather; ways to sit as well as stand, crouch or climb; providing bathrooms and water, first aid kits and snacks, transportation and communication. However it is also important to think about the ways that a classroom where everything is alive is very different from a typical indoor school classroom, and how it offers very different kinds of learning possibilities.

Dr. Susan Gerofsky is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at UBC and a member of the Board of EartHand Gleaners Society.

Many of you will join me in my excitement over this announcement — I’m finally teaching  a workshop on how to make the woven slippers! thanks due, as always, to Vladimir Yarish and his book, Plaited Basketry with Birch Bark.
Saturday February 6,  9:30am to 6:00pm including breaks
MacLean Park Fieldhouse, Strathcona
$125 including materials
Register on the Workshops page at EartHand.com.

For those of you who haven’t seen these slippers before, here’s a bit of background and some of my thoughts, based on a few years of making them in a variety of different materials:

I’ve been in love with Lapti, the Russian/Scandinavian woven slippers, since the moment I first saw one, on display at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC.  I swoon over their fascinating structure, and being able to make each shoe in one piece out of any flat, weave-able material, without needing a mould.
(I know you’re rolling your eyes and thinking “Geek!”, right?)

But these slippers catch the eyes and imaginations of everybody; when my kids went to school with their felt slippers, I had parents coming up to me to say they’d seen them and asking how they could get a pair for themselves or their kids, too. When I wore a pair of yucca slippers running an errand in the DTES, the street folks were equally keen to know about what I was wearing. Why is this? I wondered.

Well first of all, they’re cute, but not gooey; not amorphous like most felt footwear, slippers, and non-leather footwear, they look both comfy and sophisticated at the same time. And if you’re into the Luxe Handmade a la Etsy aesthetic, these slippers made in felt are an instant classic.

Second, they’re conspicuously hand-made. All baskets are hand-made (even the plastic $2 easter baskets at the dollar store…), but these look so obviously un-machined that they’re like headline ads for human ingenuity. Even non-weavers are instantly curious about how they’re made.

Third, going a bit deeper (and maybe being a geek about this), these slippers make the idea of making a pair of shoes more accessible to all of us. Making, and knowing how to make, imparts a powerful sense of agency and self-sufficiency. You don’t have to be a dedicated urban homesteader to feel the pull of a more direct experience of things, the satisfaction of making something real with your hands instead of touching buttons on a screen.

​So if the idea of making your own woven slippers appeals to you, please go to the Workshops page on EartHand.com — scroll down til you see the buttons to register for the Slippers Workshop — and grab yourself a spot in the group on February 6.

Citizen Science is something that we’re passionate about at EartHand, and we’re pleased to present this guest post by ecologist and EartHand Board President Jason Jones about the Audobon Society’s Christmas Bird Count – the longest running Citizen Science Bird project in the world – and birds at Trillium North Park.

If you would like to join our Citizen Science and Stewardship Group, please contact us with ‘Stewardship’ in the subject line.

All across the Americas in December and early January, wild bird enthusiasts bundle up and head outdoors to participate in their local Christmas Bird Count (CBC)

Started in 1900 by members of then-very-young Audubon Society, the CBC has grown to be one of the largest and longest Citizen Science projects in the world. In the 2014-15 CBC period in Canada alone, over 14,000 people participated in 460 separate counts tallying over 3.5 million birds. Data from the CBC allow scientists and conservationists to track changes in bird populations and distributions over a long period of time, thereby providing clues to how best protect species at risk and to provide an early warning system (a canary in a coal mine, if you will) for population declines of common species.

A critical aspects of these counts is that they are conducted in your backyard, both figuratively and literally. Indeed, one of the key findings of the CBC is an appreciation for how important green spaces in urban and suburban environments (including backyards) can be for birds at all times of year. In Trillium North Park alone, over 20 native bird species have been recorded in the past year in the small park, including some of the West Coast’s signature species like the Stellar’s Jay. Keep an eye out to see who you can see the next time you visit us at the park.

The first CBC in Vancouver was conducted in 1958. The 2015-6 CBC in Vancouver occurs today, December 20. The City’s 24-km radius count area is centered in Mount Pleasant and extends north into the North Shore Mountains, west to encompass all of the UBC peninsula and parts of Howe Sound, south through Richmond, and east to Burnaby Mountain. For more information on local CBC efforts and on local birding activities in general, check with Nature Vancouver

There are many things we can do to improve the value of our personal and community green spaces for the birds:

1. Keep cats indoors. Feral and pet cats kill millions of birds in North America each year.
2. Ensure that there is a source of clean, fresh water. Water can be a tremendously limiting resource for birds. Change water frequently to prevent stagnation and breeding of pest insects (e.g., mosquitoes).
3. Cultivate and encourage native plant species that provide food or shelter for birds (e.g., red flowering current or nodding onion for hummingbirds, elderberry for fruit eaters) and beneficial insects (e.g., asters, camas, yarrow).

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we are very fortunate in Vancouver to have so many parks to visit and enjoy. It is important treat our communal public green spaces with the respect they deserve, not only for the value they provide wildlife but the value they provide our communities.

If you would like to join our Citizen Science and Stewardship Group, please contact us with ‘Stewardship’ in the subject line.

Jason Jones is a terrestrial ecologist and the president of the board of EartHand Gleaners Society.

Marina is an artist we respect very much, for the integrity of her practice, its breadth, and how she has helped to shape our city’s culture. Sharon interviewed Marina for the chapter on Celebrations of Honor and Respect in Common Threads: weaving community through collaborative eco-art, talking mostly about Marina’s work with Paula Jardine on the Night for All Souls held annually at Mountain View Cemetery in Vancouver.

Marina is often the mastermind behind the scenes, but she can also stand in front of you, and with genuine warmth and connection, open some windows on new ways of being and doing. Marina joined EartHand Gleaners at the Heart of the City Open House at Trillium Park last weekend, November 8th, bringing her ‘Travelling Apothecary Tea Room’, and giving us a taste of her practice in herbalism. Marina brings to her herbalism practice the same qualities that mark her art practice: empathy, compassion, and respect.

Marina will be leading a workshop in herbalism, Plant Based Medicine-Making for Community Immunity, on Sunday, January 17. Find the link to register on the Urban Weaving Retreats Fall 2015 page — scroll to the bottom.

Our Urban Cloth Project video is now complete, take a look, and find it and more videos on our new video and resource page.

https://vimeo.com/143698614

Many of you who follow us and have been to some of our events know how crazy we are about flax and linen.

For those of you who are new… did you know that linen and cotton are from completely different plants, and made from different parts of those plants? Linen is made from fibres in the skin of the flax plant! Did you know that flax grows readily in northern climates, while cotton does not; and that flax is one of humanity’s oldest know agricultural crops?

We’ll be exploring the wonder of the flax-to-line process and some of the stories and mythology that surround it in two Free, Family-Friendly events next weekend – outdoors, so dress for the weather!

1/ Saturday October 3 (10am-noon) Aberthau Flax=Fibre+Food Reprised! Aberthau Mansion (WPGCC), 4397 West 2nd Avenue, at Village Vancouver Demonstration Permaculture Garden (north of the Mansion, off of Marine Drive)

Register:  Ross Moster at ross@villagevancouver.ca or on the Village Vancouver website.

2/ Sunday October 4 (10am-2pm) Hastings Learning Garden Place-Making Festival, 3096 East Hastings

No registration required

The first day of fall was earlier this week, and we’re proud to present our fall Urban Weaving Retreats schedule! Find it under the Urban Weaving Retreats drop-down menu above.

Some highlights:

Guest artist Marina Szijarto will be sharing her practice in herbalism with us just in time for the cold-and-flu season — Plant Based Medicine Making for Community Immunity — Saturday afternoon, October 3, just a week and a half away!

Rebecca and Sharon will be leading at least three Urban Weaving Bootcamps — these are our crash courses in basic skills, to get you ramped up and ready to weave in one of our longer retreats.

Rebecca will be hosting another evening of Small Diagonal Plaited Baskets — with veneer for beginners; and for those of you familiar with the form already, using rough bark and yucca, and experimenting with corners — and in time to refresh for a Diagonal-Plaited Slippers retreat, early in the new year.

Sharon was busy this summer making herself the most enviable, hand-woven travel accessories imaginable for her time in Spain this fall. In December, she’ll be hosting a one-day retreat called Palm Pocket: Woven Hand Clutch, so that the rest of us may have the opportunity to make something as stylish as her accessories!