FEATURE
Provocative Pedagogy:
What Interpretive Methods Offer in Traditional Education Spaces
BEHIND THE ARTICLE
Middle school students help with potato harvesting. Photo by Joshua Hunter.
If I close my eyes and try to describe “green,” this is what comes to my mind.
It’s warm, and humid, and it smells earthy. It has a slight hum of either breeze or insect wings. It's reminiscent of time spent with a grandmother in a garden. It’s memories of catching worms and grasshoppers, cooking with mud, sticks and pinecones, the taste of a fresh tomato, or the snap of a green bean. It stays under your nails and lingers on your knuckles. It is a feeling of something alive. And I love it.
Opening the door of our garden classroom is overpowering. It has a very different feel moving from the hallway or from another college classroom. The damp and peaty smell hits you as quickly as the bright sunlight. The small gnats wait to greet you once you get a little further inside. First timers always stop and say something along the lines of, “I love the smell of dirt,” or, “This feels like summer.” These comments happened so frequently we started cataloging what people described when they first entered. They always described another person (most often an older family member) or a time and place (always outside). Every comment is unique and different, yet strikingly similar. This space evokes a memory.
As a “classroom,” our indoor garden space has non-traditional educational goals: to model environmental and community values of stewardship, sustainability, community engagement, and responsibility through garden education. Sustainability education fosters holistic and integrated approaches to learning about interconnected systems using learning practices that nurture ecological, social and economic vitality. Sustainability education also views cooperation and community engagement and responsibility as central to educational outcomes. Using the three pillars of sustainability (ecological, social, and economic) as a guide, our goals include:
- Developing ecological literacy and a sense-of-place in our community through sustainable gardening;
- Creating a sustainable model of community engaged stewardship and sustainability through garden education;
- Addressing social, economic, and ecological needs of our community; and
- Providing food and well-being for our community.
Children love to show what they have harvested from the garden. Photo by Joshua Hunter.
Because the garden classroom is in the Education building, centrally located on the university’s campus, it is difficult for the broader community to find and access. We regularly host community and school groups after paperwork is filed and permissions are granted and after hours when parking restrictions are lifted. However, it did not take us long to sense the juxtaposition between the feeling of life when we walked into the garden classroom and the feeling of detachment from layered walls surrounding its access. We needed a place both outside and on the fringes of the university, both metaphorically and physically. Community access became one impetus for being on the fringe of campus. The assumptions around learning became the second. Being on the fringe allowed different goals and methods to emerge.
Our red wheelbarrow of harvest to share. Photo by Joshua Hunter.
Growing the Learning Garden Community Space
Developing a learning garden community space on a college campus has illuminated the difference between creating and using interpretive goals for those that visit the learning garden community as opposed to using traditional goals and methods in an outdoor classroom. I experience the difference between interpretation and education everyday as this endeavor unfolds. I am a novice interpreter who initially, and naively, thought interpretation and education were two peas in the same pod.
As the project developed from an indoor garden classroom with a small greenhouse into a dedicated outdoor space for a learning garden community, I began to understand how different the goals of interpretation are (according to my project partner who is a naturalist) to the goals of education (based on my background in teaching and learning). We often use both terms, learning garden and outdoor classroom, to help the public generally understand what this space is. However, I now understand how different those two concepts can be, based on our goals for learning in this space.
In our university, while there are classes that teach interpretation, we could find no spaces that privileged interpretive methods. We could find gardens that students planted and harvested, arboretums where nature was named and cataloged, greenhouses with plants for research, display cases for sharing important information, spaces to tour, etc. There is tremendous educational information behind glass or within walls. An accessible and interpretive space was missing. Unbeknownst to me, creating this interpretive learning space would challenge much of my training in education, which was rooted in specific assumptions about teaching and learning.
Learners tell a story about their day in the garden through art. Photo by Joshua Hunter.
Education’s Roots
I was steeped in traditional American methods of teaching and learning—first as an elementary teacher and then as an education researcher. Most of my experiences were rooted within the field of education, where methods on how to teach are based on what we believe about how people learn. And the questions we ask about how people learn predominantly come from the cognitive domain, or are explored within learning sciences.
In my education training, I read hypothesis-driven research, followed a constructed and systematic curriculum, collected data on students that turned into numbers, tested students more frequently each year, and measured students against their peers at a particular age or stage. The walled classroom was considered the best replication of the real world where my students would engage, eventually.
In the American context, the impact of educational philosopher John Dewey and his approach to direct experience with learning concepts still resonates. The educational psychology of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky directed attention to individual student learning, understanding cognition, scaffolding of concepts, and subsequently the classroom as a laboratory, in which data is collected on student and teacher interactions, developing new methods of teaching learners.
It is important to understand that how an educational space is structured and used by the teacher and learner directly reflects the educational assumptions about learning. In the traditional classroom, built upon the philosophy and psychology of learning, what students should know has mostly been decided, standards and benchmarks created, and content taught directly. Teachers scaffold and adjust for learners, measure understanding, and evaluate students compared to the content standards and peers. Students construct their understanding of concepts amongst this instruction. The execution of learning happens almost exclusively inside the classroom where it can be controlled. There are clear reasons to approach education from a scientific orientation, a cognitive approach, and direct instruction, especially when education is closely tied to workforce development.
However, as we created our learning garden community space, we asked ourselves several questions. Do we want to take the concepts and beliefs about learning in a classroom and just transport it outside? Are we merely removing the walls but keeping the same methods of education and assumptions about learning? Or are we creating a fundamentally different type of space with different goals of learning? And who will have access?
A college student mentors youth during fall harvest sessions. Photo by Joshua Hunter.
Our student Garden Fellows lead a discovery table exploration. Photo by Joshua Hunter.
A Mentor Center volunteer and Garden Fellows share their experiences at a "tasting table" right in the garden. Photo by Joshua Hunter.
What Interpretation Brings to the Garden
While still a learner in the field of interpretation, the principle of interpretation as meeting “the thing itself” resonated with our goals of sustainability education. Tilden Freeman’s interpretation principles draw upon phenomenology, a philosophy situating all meaning as derived from people’s lived experiences and their interaction with phenomenon. The “thing itself,” here, is the living garden and biotic community that surrounds it. The learning garden community space, while at the heart educative, did not align with a cognitive and direct instruction approach to learning. We want students learning by being in the space, with the space, and leave wanting to care for and protect the space they experienced. The interpretive principles of relating, tending to the whole person, and provocation became our orienting methods of teaching and learning.
Fostering a learning environment that relates to the lived experience and background of each person is a cornerstone concept in interpretation. Where a person comes from and what they care about is essential when fostering connections between people and the natural world. This requires expecting learners to
share meaningful experiences while we support diverse ways of learning and working with the garden.
While we could reduce garden learning down to a harvest of nutrition, that is only one element of the whole story. Worms and beetles, wind and rain, seeds, compost, and soil are all represented in the unfolding daily life of the garden providing all its beings sustenance. The entire garden greets each learner; therefore, experiences for the learner must involve the multiple ways people learn, engage, and become aware in the garden. Garden learning involves all our sensibilities—artistic, emotive, expressive, kinesthetic, cognitive—and the multitude of sensibilities are rooted in our storying of the garden space.
Finally, provocation is our ultimate goal. Within each interaction, we provide information, reveal emotive connections and provoke our participants into taking action. Provocation is a call to action. We ask learners to consider a different approach or perspective, work to be more sustainable, or take an active role in local food production.
Provocative Pedagogy as Interpretive Method
Provocative pedagogy differs in purpose, structure, and method from traditional methods of education. The purpose is to provoke learners to be active in sustainable practices (such as composting, diversity of planting, reduction of toxins, local agriculture, etc.). This is not to say that the understanding of concepts and facts about sustainability are not important. It is a natural by-product but not our primary purpose.
The structure of provocative pedagogy requires a place-based space that privileges experience with “the things themselves” in the garden. Rows of seats outside, all turned toward a center stage, mirror the indoor classroom but turn learners’ backs to the surrounding world of experience. The space is structured for immediate and sustained direct experience with a multiplicity of garden spaces.
Provocative pedagogy uses methods that evoke emotion, encourage the relationship between learner and nature, and validate personal experience. Evoking emotion and personal experiences require the learner to first engage through touch, sight, smell, and then memory. Evocation of a memory also encourages the relationship between the learner and natural world. Starting first with building a relation to “the thing itself” stands in contrast to methods that start by naming, labeling, and classifying the natural world and then trying to establish a connection.
Our touch and smell garden is an example where there are no identifiers, names, or classifications. First, learners look closely and touch the plants. “What do the leaves look like?” “Are there flowers?” “What’s different between the plants?” Learners then touch each plant and smell their fingers and are asked, “What memory does this remind you?” We may hear “my father’s pasta sauce” or “my grandma’s kitchen on a Sunday afternoon.” Evocation emphasizes the relationship between learner and nature through use of personal memory. All answers are correct because each learners’ experiences are valid. Only after experience, emotion, relation, and validation occur do we introduce a name, label, or concept.
Provocative pedagogy is not driven by what content the learner needs to know, with the content units broken down, already identified for the learner to then (re)construct on their own. Provocative pedagogy as a method requires a space to be in that evokes emotion and individual experience, interactions that further build the relational experiences with the place and fosters care about that place and things. Caring about place is the primary way to provoke the action of sustainable community practices.
Provocative Pedagogy, as an interpretive method, sustains our arc of stewardship for the green spaces that help sustain us. We believe that by prioritizing an individual's experiences and awareness in the garden leads to knowledge and understanding of the space, which ultimately leads to love.
Families participate in monthly Family Nights in the Learning Garden. Photo by Joshua Hunter.
