Entrance Slip,9/24

 Reading Susan’s work on UBC’s learning gardens made me pause at two striking moments:

 First, the warning that "where land is viewed as equivalent to money, even the existence of a small garden... may be seen as an obstacle to 'progress' and profit" stopped me in my tracks because it brutally exposes how vulnerable ecological spaces are to real estate development, reminding me that maintaining a school garden is an ideological pushback against purely capitalistic metrics of success.

 Second, the idea of acknowledging the garden as a living "co-teacher" made me reflect on how deeply rooted we are in anthropocentric, indoor schooling, challenging me to rethink the traditional classroom hierarchy and embrace a biophilic, empathetic relationship with non-human ecosystems.

  In my secondary mathematics teaching, I want to translate these reflections by using the garden as a hands-on, living laboratory where students explore geometry, spatial design, scaling, and statistical data modelling through real-world planting rather than abstract textbook numbers. While I anticipate difficulties such as seasonal timing discrepancies and rigid school schedules, we can work through these barriers by cultivating hardy cold-season crops, establishing student-led summer stewardship clubs, and deliberately anchoring core curriculum competencies in outdoor, place-based learning so that the garden never gets dismissed as a decorative, dispensable add-on

Comments

  1. Susan Gerofsky24 September 2026 at 09:14

    Lovely, Mahnaz! I’ve certainly spent many years as an educator pushing back against those hyper capitalist metrics of success — not to go against commerce completely, but there is much that is important in life beyond just money! Very interesting ideas here.

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