Justice Through School Gardens Impact Outcomes
Justice Through School Gardens
Students in the Justice Through School Gardens Lab partnered with co-faculty from the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies and Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College as well as Arizona artist Joan Baron to learn about food justice, environmental justice and climate justice. Throughout the semester the team researched and designed new pathways for school gardens to become agents of change for our food system.
Student Outcomes
Advocacy Posters & StoryMaps
Students conducted research, interviews and elementary school visits to learn more about their chosen areas of interest within the constructs of justice through school gardens. As a result, each team developed an advocacy poster promoting their research findings while proposing concepts for situational improvements. The posters were then displayed at ASU's Emerge 2022: Eating at the Edges, A Festival of Food Future held at the Mesa Arts Center, New City Plaza Park, & The Media and Immersive eXperience (MIX) Center. View their posters and StoryMap links below.
Emerge Event
Lab students in partnership with their co-faculty and environmental artist, hosted an immersive hands-on booth during the Emerge event. Guests who visited the booth were invited to plant their own Moringa tree seed and were provided with instructions on proper care for the seedling once they brought it home.
View all presentations HERE.
Fresh Futures
For their impact outcome, Emily Stabilito, Hirni Shah, Soleil Bejarano, and Allie Larue articulate how implementing school gardens can help fight child hunger and enrich learning by creating example assignments for a school garden curriculum. View their entire StoryMap here.
Growing Food and Nutrition Security
This team's impact outcome focuses on situating school gardens in the context of Arizona, with a focus on land use and the current water crisis. View Elizabeth Carr, Elora Bevacqua, Bryce Whitcomb, Jasmine Amoako-Agyei, Brooke Bennett, Kaylee Barrick, and Sam Harris's entire StoryMap here.
Humans Are Nature
Rachel Antidormi's story map focuses on mending the tear in the human-nature connection, and theorizing what we can do to eliminate hunger and nutrition problems in order to set up children for success. View her impact outcome here.
Justice Starts at Home
Ryan Brown, Bradley McNish, Marshall Morgan, Julian Padilla, Dawson Singer, Shardul Shetye, and Jose Valdez's impact outcome zeros in on the dearth of good nutrition options for marginalized communities. Addressing the challenge, the team created home garden kits that offer a complete personal gardening experience that can function and scale. They aim to donate 100 of these kits to families in historically marginalized communities by the end of Fall 2023. Learn more about their impact outcome here.
Snackin' in Nature
To address the lack of garden foci in Arizona school curriculums, Aspen Carroll, Allison Hoops, Zoller Peffley, and Crystal Catalan created a middle school curriculum that covers balanced meals, consumer awareness, cultural food recognition, and food sustainability. View their entire impact outcome here.
Social Media Takeover
Several of the student teams partnered with local elementary schools to conduct garden research visits. One team named "Snackin' in Nature" visited Garfield Elementary to experience their school garden firsthand. While there, the team documented their experience and partnered with the Humanities Lab to then take over our Instagram sharing their experience with our audience and building awareness around work that would be displayed at the Emerge festival. Click here to learn more about their visit and to see the social media takeover.
Emerge Event
As part of the Lab's final impact outcome, the students in partnership with their faculty partners and community artist, hosted a booth in the Emerge event. They publicly displayed their posters and StoryMaps while discussing the importance of school gardens with the community— including ideas and methods for planting and harvesting your own food. People who visited the booth could also plant and take a Moringa tree seed!
Grants
In order to earn the funds needed to initiate these projects, the Justice Through School Gardens students applied for and received the following grants:
– Marshall Morgan, Ryan Brown, Bradley McNish, Dawson Singer, Shardul Shetye, Julian Padilla, and Jose Valdez were awarded an Amplifier Mini-Grant for their Justice Starts at Home outcome.
– The whole class was awarded an Amplifier Mini-Grant for their Food Justice: For the Youth by the Youth outcome.
Working with the local school, we created gardening kits so that students could learn how to garden at home. We also created a video series which explains step-by-step how to grow your own plants and cook books to help students cook the food they harvested. As a class, we also took part in the "Emerge" event where we engaged with the community and discussed why school gardens matter.
-- Morgan Marshall, Justice Through School Gardens Humanities Lab student
My group worked on exploring how the standards and curriculum in Arizona could be updated to incorporate food system education that revolves around the 4 key topics we identified: balanced meals, consumer awareness, sustainability, and cultural awareness. We created a lesson plan and accompanying activity to illustrate how the curriculum could be incorporated into a classroom with or without a traditional school garden. We also worked to provide the resources we created to the digital resource database on the Arizona Farm to School Network so teachers all over the state could take inspiration.
-- Zoller Peffley, Justice Through School Gardens Humanities Lab student
Collaborative Partners
- Joan Baron, Baron Studio
- Paige Mollen, Mollen Foundation