I. The Edible Schoolyard
The Edible Schoolyard is an interactive garden and kitchen classroom that was founded at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California in 1995 by the chef and food activist Alice Waters. Edible Schoolyard programs also operate at Samuel J. Green and Arthur Ashe Charter Schools in New Orleans (since 2006); at Monte del Sol Charter School, Santa Fe, New Mexico (since 2007); at Greensboro Children’s Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina; at the Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco (Willie Mays Clubhouse at Hunters Point) in San Francisco, California; and a new Edible Schoolyard is under construction at P.S. 216 in Brooklyn (due to open in Fall 2010).(all content below compiled from the Edible Schoolyard website: http://www.edibleschoolyard.org/)
The Edible Schoolyard provides services to the wider community, including summer training programs, teacher institutes and seasonal events and celebrations.
Guiding Principles
The following principles guide the Edible Schoolyard program:
*Participatory: Classes in the kitchen and garden model sustainable practices and engage children in hands-on lessons that connect food, health and the environment.
* Integrated: The program is woven into the academic curriculum, linking to studies in history, math, science and the humanities.
* Shared: ESY creates opportunities for children to share a family-style meal together with teachers and adult volunteers.
* Delicious: The ESY serves only food that is local, organic, seasonal and tasty.
* Beautiful: Our program environment is designed to inspire personal and social responsibility, and to serve as a model for other schools.
Objectives
Students who participate in the Edible Schoolyard program learn about the connection between their everyday food choices and the health of the community, the environment, and themselves. These lessons foster sound nutritional practice, responsible food choices, and environmental stewardship.
Students learn about:
Cycles, seasonality, and change; Sustainability; Connectedness to land, school, and community; Environmental and personal impact of food choices; Wellness through knowledge of healthy choices; The place of beauty, innovation, experimentation and observation in their education.
Some of the things growing at the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley:
tea beds, a herb garden, shitake, oyster and portobello mushrooms, Seville oranges, kiwis, winter squash, thirteen varieties of heirloom shelling beans, wheat, barley, corn, amaranth, quinoa, millet, flax, olives, apples, mache, arugula, mustards, kale, bok choi, carrots, turnips, beets, garlic, fava beans, potatoes, plums, ground cherries, blackcurrants, hazelnuts, figs, raspberries, edible bamboo, hibiscus, jasmine, passionflower, chayote, corn, blackberries, gourds, tomatoes, onions, leeks, peppers, broccoli, collard greens, pears, asparagus, loquat, chives, mulberries, grapes, cape gooseberries, peas.
Funding for the Edible Schoolyard programs comes from the Chez Panisse Foundation (started by Alice Waters in 1997), whose advisory board includes master foragers, sustainable agriculture pioneers, public education activists, sociologists, event planners, former senators as well as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Wendell Berry, Eleanor Coppola, Frances Moore Lappé, Bette Midler and Michael Pollan, amongst others. The 2007 operating budget for the Foundation was around $1,300,000.
A few of the things we discussed at our RERC meeting were:
- If the model for Edible Schoolyards depends heavily on outside support, how can projects inspired by its programming be implemented in other cash-starved districts where individuals may not have the “connections” of the Foundation’s influential Board and Advisors?
- What are the implications of private foundations funding such innovative programs in public schools?
- Who is doing similar things independently or on a smaller scale? What’s happening in Canada?
- We were surprised that there were few mentions of the arts on the pages of the Edible Schoolyard and thought that linking the garden/kitchen programming with visual, performing and language arts curriculums would be both obvious and amazing
For further reading, visit:
http://www.edibleschoolyard.org/
http://www.esynola.org/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/dining/20edible.html
II. Francisco Ferrer and the Modern Schools movement.
Francisco Ferrer's Escuela Moderna, founded in 1901 in Barcelona, was a "school of emancipation" that aimed to combine popular education and social activism. It was at once a school for children, an adult education centre, a radical publication house, and a center for revolutionary activity. While the first Escuela Moderna only lasted a few short years, hundreds of other schools were built on this model, in Spain and around the world.Ferrer drew on the rich 18th and 19th-century tradition of free schools, which hoped to liberate education from religious dogmatism and political domination. Free schools promoted secular knowledge and the cause of science, as well as knowledge of society and history. Freedom in education also meant freedom from the authority of the teacher, and a shift from rote learning to self-directed study. As William Godwin wrote, capturing this enlightened educational philosophy: "No creature in human form will be expected to learn anything but because he desires it and has some conception of its utility and value."
Ferrer's Escuela Moderna combined this student-directed philosophy with a radical political program aimed at the emancipation of Spanish workers, who had few educational opportunities outside church-run schools. The school eliminated rewards and punishments, and made no effort to enforce classroom discipline. Practical knowledge was valued over book-learning, and teachers organized visits to factories, laboratories, museums and parks, as well as to the surrounding hills and seashore. The worker-parents of the young students were encouraged to attend lectures at the school, and the school's publishing house commissioned textbooks from some of the finest scientific minds of Europe.
Classrooms were not segregated by sex — a particularly scandalous move in the eyes of church and state authorities.
Teachers at the Escuela Moderna may have let the students' interests guide their learning, but they promoted specific social values: liberty, equality, social justice, brotherhood, anti-militarism and sympathy with the downtrodden and oppressed. The school saw itself (in the words of historian Paul Avrich) as both "an instrument of self-development and a lever of social regeneration." Ferrer and his radical teachers thought they were creating a new, more equal society in embryo. In their eyes, the school was both an enclave of freedom and a vehicle for social transformation.
The Spanish government naturally saw the Escuela Moderna as a hotbed of sedition, and closed the school in 1906. Ferrer himself was executed on a trumped-up charge a few years later.
The Escuela Moderna gave birth to the International League for the Rational Education of Children, founded in 1908 before Ferrer's death. A journal, L'École Renové, was also started to spread Ferrer's libertarian ideas. "Modern Schools" inspired by the Escuela Moderna began to spring up across Spain, Europe, and the Americas. Often tied to anarchist values and movements, these schools have inspired and engaged radical educators for more than a hundred years.At RERC's meeting on April 26th, we discussed Ferrer's legacy, and wondered whether we still shared some of his assumptions and convictions about human nature, education, philosophy and politics. We also wondered: "What does it mean to educate children to be free in an unfree society?"
For more information on the Modern School Movement, check out:
Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States.
http://www.akpress.org/2004/items/modernschoolmovement
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