John Dewey & Food: Linking School to the Lives of Our Youth

1. DEWEY & EXPERIENCE

In “Experience and Education” John Dewey opens discussing the “organic connection between education and personal experience.”  He goes on to explain “that does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative… everything depends on the quality of the experience.”

“The quality of the experience has two aspects…. there is an immediate aspect of agreeableness or disagreeableness and there is its influence upon later experiences…  hence the central problem of education based upon experience is to select the kind of present experiences that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences.”

In later chapters he addresses the problem that some experiences are worthwhile for education and while others are not.  This is where schools come in.  It is our job as educators to provide experiences that are:

1. Agreeable
   
2. Lead to further experiences
   
3. Worthwhile for education

It took me a few years in the classroom before I got that.  Instead of telling students about something, I let them see it, touch it, smell it, hear it and even taste it. Once I realized this my classroom became much more enjoyable for my students and myself.

Taste it?  This is how we get from Dewey to food.

FOOD & GARDENING

I was recently in a curriculum meeting with another biology teacher and we came to the realization that you can teach the whole biology curriculum, and probably earth and physical science as well, in the garden. As you will see from the videos below, growing food can also provide physical activity, history and math lessons as well as creative space where children can become artist and poets.  So it is clear gardening is an experience that is worthwhile for education.

We all need to eat so it can be linked to the lives of our youth and if it is done right, it is a very agreeable experience that brings students back for more.

Let’s start by looking at the potential of gardening and food production in schools with this video about “Edible Schoolyards.”

This links to a short video showing the potential of gardening in schools.

Here is a slightly different model of community gardens as a means to empower youth. My cousin came across this space while walking around the 9th Ward on a recent trip to New Orleans.

This links to the School at Blair Grocery where they built a community garden as part of larger work around youth empowerment.

Much closer to home, Incahoots created a community garden right around the corner in Long Branch.

Incahoots Community Garden in Long Branch, NJ.

Finally, just for fun, here is a link to what Will Allen is doing with Growing Power.  Listening to this guys just gets me excited about the potential for our community.

This links to a short interview with Will Allen of Growing Power!

Grounded in  John Dewey’s philosophical framework of experiential education and riding the wave created by Edible Gardens and Growing Power,  community gardens seem like the perfect match for a district that is looking to reinvent itself with an new student-centered curriculum.