Dinah: Welcome to Farm to School Northeast, a podcast where we explore the creative ways that local food is getting into school cafeterias and how food system education is playing out in classrooms and school gardens across the northeast. Today we have a chance to talk with Jen Reese, Science and Garden Coordinator with Amherst and Pelham Public Schools and garden educator Leila Tunnell, who co-lead the Amherst Elementary School Garden Program in Amherst, Massachusetts. The program believes in the power of garden based learning to inspire joy and help build a more just and sustainable world, and provides all students in grades K to six with year-round garden based learning in both school garden spaces as well as in classrooms. Jen and Lela and their community partners believe that garden based learning should be accessible to every student and have built the program around this value. 

Welcome, Jen and Leila, can you introduce yourself to the listeners and in particular share how your work and interests are connected to the topic of farm to school?

Jen: Of course. Thank you. So, hello, my name is Jen Reese. I'm the Science and Garden Coordinator at Amherst and Pelham, as you said, public schools in western Massachusetts. Leila and I created the school garden program together in 2016, and we've been collaborating on it together since. In my work and in my personal life, I'm passionate about connecting people with nature, about leaning into curiosity and wonder and creating spaces where people can engage with curiosity and wonder. I'm into systems thinking and interdependence and zooming out and zooming in and looking at the way that we all interact with one another and the physical earth in different ways. And really also this connects to sustainability and earth health, and as people develop relationships with nature, my hope is that we're also helping folks feel connected to ways that they want to be engaged with being part of a healthy earth system and their own wellness and their own experiences of joy. 

Leila: And hi, I'm Leila Tennell and I am the Garden educator for the Amherst and Pelham Public Schools. And my job is to work with all the kids out in the school gardens in their classrooms, and it's the most joyful work I could ever choose. I have a background in farming and in education and knew that I really wanted to be pulling in what I knew about education and importance of education and cultural responsive teaching and get kids outside, connecting them to food, to nature, to growing. And it feels like magic every day.

Dinah: It's an amazing thing to have work that feels like magic. So can you walk us through the Amherst Elementary School Garden program– how is the program structured so that all of the students in your elementary program have access?

Leila: So as Jen mentioned, we started our collaboration together in 2016. The Amherst Schools had a small line item towards garden something, and we had just received a grant as a district to put in raised beds at all the schools and a garden committee was formed. And Jen and I both ended up in this space and knew immediately that we wanted to work together. And we started by offering garden learning to any kindergarten classroom that wanted. So we started really small with our youngest learners knowing that if we could build buy-in at that level and excitement and generate some really great vibes for garden based learning with those teachers and students and families, then that would be our biggest foothold in building a sustainable program moving forward. And so that the following year we offered it to every kindergartner and first grade classroom and every classroom opted in. And after that, it became not an opt-in opt out situation, but part of the codified curriculum for our elementary school students. So we've added a grade level every year, and we are now working with every single K through six classrooms in the entire Amherst and Pelham district. So that's 61 classrooms and over 1100 kids and many educators as well. And we see each of those classrooms about five times, sometimes more over the course of a school year, both in the school gardens and in their classrooms.

Dinah: Leila, would you recommend this kind of rollout to schools that are just getting started in school gardens?

Leila: Yes, absolutely. This felt really, really like a helpful model for us for a lot of reasons. One, it felt sustainable for us as we developed new curricula. We didn't have to start with just everything at once. And so it felt like a slow rollout for us where we could really be intentional about how we wanted to incorporate standards and learning and all kinds of themes and topics into our garden curricula. And also, as I said, mentioned, as I mentioned earlier, it did really build buy-in for us. The kindergarten students got excited about learning in the garden and expected that moving forward, as did their families. And those teachers luckily enjoyed working with us and were able to advocate for our program as well. So it was really no issue after that first year to have everyone jump on board and want to be participating in this garden learning.

Dinah: So how do you integrate what you are doing in the school gardens with what teachers are teaching in the classroom?

Jen: Yeah, thank you for asking that. That's a really important consideration for us because as we've thought about how we wanted to develop the program, Leila spoke to this point, we wanted the program and want the program to be for everyone. We want it to be excellent, really. And so part of making sure that it works for everyone and part of making sure that we're holding ourselves to standards that really that the curriculum fits in, it doesn't feel like an extra, it's not an add-on, it’s not an option, but it's into the fabric of the school and the curriculum and the learning. One of those pieces is by doing standards alignment. And so as we built our program, it's a spiraling curriculum where there are different themes and big questions that kids are examining each year, each grade. And those are aligned to the Massachusetts Science Technology and Engineering framework and the history and social science framework.

And so that helps us make sure that thematically and content wise and skills wise, the stuff that we're addressing in the garden spaces, garden learning spaces is connected to what's happening in the classroom. And we also are in very close touch with the teachers. And so sometimes there are special projects going on, or sometimes I might be in a classroom and I get to listen to a piece of a lesson and it just makes me think, oh gosh, well that really surprisingly, that's connected to radishes and I wouldn't have otherwise known that if I hadn't happened to be in the space. And then I can connect with the teacher later and say, do you want us to make sure we're bringing in something more about this, that, or the other? So that's a piece too, is there's a little bit of dynamism there with just staying in relationship with the teachers. And they're essential partners in the work because they're sharing their instructional time and instructional minutes are precious. In elementary, the teachers have so much that they're expected to do in a day and in a week and in a year. And so we don't take for granted that we just get those minutes. We're going to make sure that they're impactful and that they feel good. The teachers feel good about sharing those minutes with us, too.

Dinah: Can you describe some of your most exciting school garden projects? What are you both really excited about right now?

Leila: We got a lot to be excited about. Right now, we're both feeling really good about curricula we've developed over the years, but in the past few years, we've shifted from really focusing on integrating science and technology standards in the school garden to also integrating social studies and social science learning and frameworks into our curricula as well, which has really opened up some cool opportunities to talk about native land use and culturally responsive, how to integrate, what are kids eating their families, and how can we grow those crops in our school gardens? So one grade level that we really love and hold dear is our fourth grade program where as leaders in the garden program, kids that have mostly received garden learning since kindergarten, they get to choose which crops we grow in the school garden. And they have a year long project where they think about foods that are important to them and have stories in their families and communities.

And then they actually get to interview an elder in their community, either at home or at school to learn more about the foods that that person eats and the history behind those foods. And then from there, students choose what are the foods that would most reflect their families, their cultures, their communities, and then we figure out which of those foods can grow in our climate and how can we then choose from that list of foods that we actually end up planting. And every fourth grade class gets to choose between three and five crops to grow. So we have a whole school garden full of all of these really amazing things. So we had, last year we had bok choy, we had rice, we had wheat, we had corn, we had cilantro, we had Thai basil, we had peppers and tomatoes and sweet potatoes and regular potatoes, just like this really diverse, cool sampling of food that was important to all of these different kids across the entire district and grade level. And that's been really, really fun for us to get to explore with these kids. And they also just come back with these amazing interviews, often in tow with these home sacred secret recipes that they also get to share. And Jen, maybe you can also speak a little bit to the art collaboration that we've developed around that curricula as well.

Jen: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as you were speaking Leila, I just smile like every time the word community came out of your mouth, because that's such a key piece for us, I feel like in terms of kids building community with one another, building community with worms and soil and insects and whoever else is in the garden space, and then also in our larger community. And so yeah, in our fourth grade project or fourth grade curriculum, working with the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, working with their education director and their student museum educators, we have developed a collaboration where the art teachers in the schools will, I guess, collaborate with meat educators for the kids to find some way to express their special food experiences through art. So each art teacher decides what that's going to look like. Is that printmaking? Is that collage making? Is that sculpting?

It can be different year to year, but the fourth graders spend time in their art classes thinking about special foods and then representing those foods artistically. And then the mead helps us document all of the artwork. And then each year for I think four years now, they produce this beautiful full color book cultivating plant memories. And every child gets a copy to bring home to share with their families that has excerpts from their interviews with their families and community members. It has sort of a scope and overview of the fourth grade learning, and then it just features color photos of all the children's art that's connected to this piece. So that's so much generosity and cool interest from Amherst College and the Mead Art Museum and just one of the many ways that we're trying to spread our roots out into the community so that everything doesn't just exist in a little school bubble world.

Dinah: So it sounds like students would be really excited to get to grade four to experience this project. This is their fourth grade project. Are there other, can you give another example of a different grade and what maybe some of the theme is for that grade?

Leila: Another, I heard you say kids would be excited to get to this grade level. I think that's really become the case with sixth grade. Over the past couple of years, we've developed a collaboration with Wheelhouse Farm Catering, which is a farm to table catering business in Amherst where the chefs from Wheelhouse create a really amazing field trip experience for our sixth graders where, and they've actually often chosen some of the foods that these groups of kids that are now sixth graders chose as fourth graders to plant in a school garden. And they've designed a menu that sixth graders then get to create and cook together. One year we did it in their classrooms and Wheelhouse brought all of their cooking equipment to their classrooms. And then starting last year, they actually brought them into their commercial kitchen space. And these kids, every classroom got to go on a field trip, got to create this beautiful spread of food with the chefs at Wheelhouse. And that's definitely generated a lot of hype. The kids are very excited to then get to go on this field trip of sixth graders, and it really felt important to us to create some kind of capstone for these kids that have been learning with us since kindergarten. So that's been a really fun thing, and we're so grateful for that collaboration with Wheelhouse. They've really made that experience special for those kids.

Jen: And I'll just chime in too. I mean, we do have in-house stuff that's fun as well. I was just going through my head for each of the grade levels and the kindergartners. I think they don't know ahead of time to be excited about it, but the whole experience of working with kindergartners in the Garden is super joyful and amazing because it's oftentimes the first time that they're seeing a carrot come out of the ground or that they get to put a seed in and then to tend it all the way through to harvest. In our second grade curriculum, there's a strong focus on roots, which I mean, if you're not, maybe Roots might not feel like they're so exciting, but when you really get into it with second graders, roots are really exciting. And there's all these different kinds of roots. You get to pull lots of plants out. We study erosion and the role of roots in the erosion, we're surrounded by farmland, we're affected by weather patterns, and so there's real authentic community-based stuff going on that's connected. And so for me, those second grade lessons that happen in the classroom, and often we do garden learning through the winter, so a lot of that erosion based learning is happening in classrooms in the winter and it's still garden learning. But man, the stuff that the kids do and that they come up with and that they ask and notice in those explorations is super cool.

Leila: Yeah. One thing I'll add to that, just because I feel excited talking about all this, is as a sort of culmination of that learning in second grade, each child gets to create, just have a little color piece of construction paper that they get to create some messaging around soil. It can be a poem, a song, a drawing, a collage, a comic book, a Billboard, a PSA. And then we've put all of these student pieces from every single second grader on these big banners that then hang in the farm shop of Brookfield Farm, which is a farm in South Amherst that we've had a really wonderful partnership with since before the Garden program even started. And so all of this really awesome second grade student learning about why soil is so important and roots are so important is hanging in the farm shop for the over 700 families that come get their food at Brookfield every week to see and learn from and experience. And that's been another really great community connection and a really cool learning that kids get really excited about. And some of those kids have CSA shares at Brookfield, so they get to go and see their work hanging on the wall, and it's been really fun. And that's the farm that they all visit as kindergartners as well. So it's got that little cyclic piece in there too.

Dinah: So with 61 classrooms and hundred kids, obviously you two aren't doing this alone, and you've mentioned Wheelhouse Catering and the Mead Museum and Brookfield Farm. Are there other community partnerships that you want to mention while we're here together that make this program really successful?

Jen: Yes, absolutely. So first, one of the partnerships that has a long history with our program is the one with the UMass Sustainable Food and Farming program that's affiliated with the Stockbridge School. Sarah Quist is our collaborator in the SFF program. Sarah's experiences with school gardens and Amherst predate both mine and Lela's. Sarah was instrumental in getting some of the first gardens going in Amherst Public Schools. And once since the Garden program has gotten underway in a more formalized way, we've stayed in really close connection with Sarah and together with her, we developed a garden based learning internship. And that garden based learning internship has been so powerful for us, and Sarah relates that it's been really powerful for the kids who are in the ag education and ag leadership programs in the Stockbridge School. And what that looks like is each semester we have between one and three undergraduate interns who are students at UMass and they join us.

We work in collaboration with those students to say, what are your goals? What would you hope to learn with us? And what can we offer in terms of that partnership? We want to be sure that the students are coming in and of course they're helping with lessons. They're helping us think about curriculum design. They're helping with some of the labor that is happening in garden spaces to make sure that all the maintenance is taken care of, and it's a two-way street. So we're here very much to support those students and they're learning. Yeah, it's just been really fantastic. So we have met some of the most amazing people through this internship program. And then one other that jumps to mind is Book and Plow Farm at Amherst College and Book and Plow have hosted us and collaborated with us in a fifth grade learning experience.

We spend a lot of our fifth grade curriculum talking about the history of local land and the uses of local land and book and plow works with us and with the Meat Art Museum where the fifth graders all get to go and visit the farm, and the kids rotate through different stations where they examine a piece of artwork from the Meads collection, and that piece of artwork is connected to land and food and all sorts of really juicy topics. Then at that station, the kids get to do a piece, do their own art expression connected to that theme and or that artwork. The setting is gorgeous, all the materials are provided, the educators are just top notch. It's a really rich, awesome experience, and again, so generous of these folks to share their time and space and expertise.

Dinah: So part of the mission of your program is that garden based learning can help build a more just and sustainable world. In what ways do you feel that school gardens help build just and sustainable worlds? And could you two speak a little bit about how a farm to school program can connect with climate change education?

Jen: Yes, absolutely. My biggest challenge in discussing this is that it's like, to me, so many days worth of conversation, it's really at the heart for me of what this is all about. I'll touch on a couple of points and then Leila, I would love to have your voice in the space to round out the things that I'm missing and the things that you're especially tuned into. I feel like, okay, there are a couple of pieces. One, and they're specific to working with elementary aged people in garden spaces. So making sure that what we're offering is developmentally appropriate and relevant, and that that's something that kids can receive. The gardens are a place of, for me, climate relevance, climate hope, and stewardship. First, being in the gardens, you can't help but be in relationship with climate change. I was just talking to Leila earlier this week, and the kids have been in the gardens trying to till the soil, and the soil is concrete and hasn't rained and far, far, far too many days.

And so naturally it's like, geez, should the soil be like this? Is it usually like this? Why is it different? It hasn't rained in a long time. How is that affecting what we need to do in the garden spaces? Or it ranged too much and all of our seeds washed away, or things feel really hot, or things feel really cold. And so it's not like a top down, let me tell you about climate change. You're just out in the world where climate change is happening, anthropogenic, accelerated, climate change is happening, and that is noticed. That's part of the experience. And so that gives us a natural prompt to just sort of think about it. Well, we have to respond. How are we going to respond to the changing conditions in the garden spaces? A big piece for me in climate change education, which I'll loop in with stewardship education, is the development of agency and hope. 

And so we do try to give the kids many, many experiences of agency in the spaces from the fourth grade curriculum where kids are choosing what crops that they're growing to, just like everyday choices you get to, this is a space where you have control and your choices matter. You actually get to act on your choices and preferences, which is a really, really important piece. When we think about climate anxiety or anxiety generally, we know that youth are really suffering from a lot of anxiety and a lot of climate anxiety. And anecdotally, and I think intuitively, we can have a sense that working with the earth and doing things outside can be a balm, but really that is research based, and there are strong data that support that If kids are engaged in collective action, that lessens climate anxiety and that increases hopefulness about the future. And it's essential that working with kids, that we are honest and that we're also super careful with how we roll out information. So to me, I think really starting with building loving relationships with the earth is key for children. And it's off quoted that first you learn about something. When you learn about it, you come to understand it. When you come to understand it, you come to value it. And when you value it, you want to protect it. And so there's really this continuum of let's just get out there and start seeing some worms, start seeing some bugs, start talking to somebody that maybe we haven't talked to before. And yeah, I mean, I think the work of being in right relationship with the earth and one another, I think that is present in the small spaces of our gardens. It happens in and around a garden bed, and if you can't do something small, you're not going to do it big. So we just do it small in lots of places so that we can really see that happening in the world.

Leila: Yeah, absolutely. I echo everything Jen said, and again, just to repeat and repeat again, in order to really want to take care of something, you first need to care about it and love it. And that's what we try to cultivate with these kids, starting when they're just little babies, little baby kindergartners. And it's so fascinating and wonderful and delightful to see these kids come to the garden and with a wide range of experience being outside, being in gardens, being in soil, touching soil, and it's everything from kids being like, yeah, I grow like this stuff in my home garden to kids like, Ooh, this is dirt. I don't want to get dirt on my shoes. So really trying to give kids the experience of putting their hands and appreciating like, oh, this isn't just dirty, but how does the soil feel and how does it smell? And thanking the soil, and thanking these spiders that seem kind of scary in the garden and generating this excitement and wonder and to see that carry through. And I think that's the magic that I spoke of earlier in introducing myself. It's magic every day to watch these children be outside and experience the world that way and grow to really care deeply about our school garden spaces and by extension our schools and by extension our communities and our earth.

Dinah: So Leila, speaking of this wide range of learners, and I imagine this wide range of staff that you welcome into these garden spaces, how do you create inclusivity for students and school staff in this program?

Leila: Yeah, great question. And constant learning for Jen and I, this is a never ending evolving conversation and goal for us. And we have a lot of different ways that we have done this and worked towards making our spaces really inclusive. And one is through lesson design. So the way that we design our lessons, they ideally are supporting many different types of learners. So one of the really special things about garden based learning is that it's often really engaging and plugging in the kids that don't necessarily feel totally at ease in classroom style learning. They get to be outside using their body and their brains in sometimes a slightly different way. So having lots of opportunities to be using all of our senses to have visual and auditory cues, and to have students really be doing fine motor and gross motor learning and using their bodies and getting energy out, but also in careful and intentional ways. 

We've also tried to integrate a lot of culturally responsive teaching practices. So fourth grade curriculum, again, being an example of really letting students lead the way and highlighting their own cultures and what is important to them, that's such a huge thing. That's an incredible understatement. But land and food is, I think one of the most important cornerstones of culture, how people interact with food, the histories of food. All of these stories about food and land use are totally integral to so many people and really hits home. And so that's something that we've tried to be really careful or deliberate about, is making sure that this land is not proprietary. We're not owning this land. We're not instilling our own values and histories and stories of foods and land use, but trying to have a broader perspective on the food that we grow and the way that we grow it, the way that we think and talk about this land. We've also integrated a lot of considerations around our space design, trying to make our gardens physically accessible. So we've made sure that we've installed a compliant wheelchair accessible raised beds in all of our school gardens, that our pathways are large enough to accommodate wheelchair use. Same with our field trips. That's been a really big consideration for us. And we bring students to farms, and there have been a lot of conversations with educators and families around how to make these experiences really safe and accessible and joyful for students of all physical abilities. 

Jen: Yeah, I think that that speaks to the school ecosystem really being healthy and working well together. For example, we've mentioned a lot of field trips that we take and unique learning experiences. We have such amazing teachers and support staff in all of the schools. And so we will reach out to the whole team and say, Hey, we've got, this is the field trip that's coming up. This is where we'll be. This is what the spaces are like. This is the infrastructure that's there. These are the tools we're going to use. These are the different stations and activities. Here's the way that we've thought about differentiating and doing accommodations and modifications. Thinking about the kids that you're working with this year. What else do we need to know? What have we missed? What can we do better? And so this is often a whole bunch of emails back and forth.

This is jumping on a Google meet, this is having a phone call. This is inviting a family. And for a meeting just to be sure that we're addressing all the pieces that are most important to each child. We just can't do that in isolation. We need to think about when we say every kid, we mean actually literally every child. And so we are just in constant communication with all the folks who have the most knowledge of the kids to say, yeah, what can we do differently? What can we do better? And then after those experiences, we reconnect and we say, okay, well, this was the plan and this is the way we thought we would approach that lesson or that experience, and how did it go? What worked well? What would you want us to do differently next time? What can we think about differently? And yeah, I mean, the expertise of all the folks in the schools is just essential for enabling us to make those experiences accessible for every kid. Can't underscore that enough.

Leila: And another thing that I'll add to is there's a group of really wonderful educators in our district that have yearly been offering an ethnic studies course, including really extensive anti-racism trainings and creating a space for teachers to really think critically about how they are incorporating ethnic studies into their just daily curriculum and the way that they're interacting with students. And they made that program available to us in the garden program and something that I learned a tremendous amount from, and I think also provide us a lot of support as we were developing both our fourth grade and fifth grade curriculums. Fourth grade being around our crop selection and fifth grade about the histories of our land and the indigenous people who live on this land and have lived on this land for thousands of years, which in our area are the Nipmuc, Nonotuc and Pocumtuc. And so having that support again from these amazing educators in our district has been a really great way to not only create dialogue between us and other educators, but also really inform our practices and how we are creating accessible, inclusive, anti-racist garden learning experiences.

Dinah: Is there anything that I did not ask you that you both would like to share?

Jen: There's nothing else that I would like to be asked, but I would like to share an expression of gratitude for all of our supporters. I feel incredibly lucky to be doing this work and to be doing this work in partnership with Lela. And our work would not be possible without a really big network of folks who support in any number of ways. So we get grant support from, or we have in the past gotten grant support from the Amherst Education Foundation, from the Whole Kids Foundation. We have received financial support from the Garden Club of Amherst. We have family volunteers who help take care of our gardens in the summer and who come out for seasonal work days in the garden spaces to help spruce things up and help us. We are a team of two, and we have intern support, but having many, the amount of work that can happen on a volunteer day in three hours is what Lila and I could do in a year. So that's absolutely huge. And again, the teachers and the administration that have lent their support and trust to us and kind of said, all right, they've let us really run with the program and given us a lot of trust in doing so. Yeah, feel super grateful and to Lela, of course, for her partnership and collaboration because Leila's a total rockstar. And our program doesn't even come close to existing without her.

Leila: I could say the same thing about you, Jen Reese and all that you hold, all that you carry, all of the amazing expertise that you bring to this and the careful communication with so many stakeholders. Yeah, incredibly grateful for doing this work always, and to all the people that support us.

Jen: We love being in communication with folks who are doing the same work or similar work or her interested. And we often are fielding emails or phone calls from folks who are in different stages of garden program development. So if there's anyone who would like to reach out or have a thought partner about the work that they're doing in garden based learning, we would love to hear from them. And so folks are welcome to reach out to either one of us and we'll get connected and be part of that ecosystem together.

Dinah: From a small line item in 2016 to eight years later, you both have clearly built with community support and school community support. You both have clearly built a really mindful and thoughtful, inclusive, and sustainable program. It feels like it could really work as a model program for other schools to adapt in their own school garden programs. And so I just really appreciate you sharing this information so that other schools and other districts might learn from your experience. So thank you. This podcast is a production of the Northeast Farm to School Collaborative. For more information about this podcast or farm to school in the northeast, go to Northeastfarmtoschool.org