Making Sense of Place: Young Learners and Community

Using the Garden as our classroom, participants will explore place-based learning and how to use storytelling to nurture identity, justice, and connections in our school communities. We will reflect on the stories rooted in our local landscapes and consider how these narratives can shape our teaching practice. We’ll question whose stories are prioritized, and whose are excluded. Through this lens, we’ll examine the relationships between Indigenous and ancestral agricultural practices and modern food systems, making connections to food justice, environmental justice, and climate change.

Participants will engage in activities that highlight the many ways plants connect us as sources of nourishment, medicine, care, and cultural meaning. Our learning will be interdependent and exploratory by creating a classroom community that is reflective of its members. We’ll center classroom connections by creating resources for each other that reflect our takeaways and reflections. The culminating project will be a lesson plan that brings what we learned together into our own communities.

This class is only available for teachers. The targeted grade levels are Middle and High school, but teachers of any grade or subject are welcome!

In order to receive P or A+ Credits, teachers must also register with ASPDP on their website.