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Arizona Digging Deeper
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At the same time, teachers and students are under extreme pressure to meet national mandates to perform well on high stakes tests, principally in math and literacy. Increasingly, then, school gardening programs are in jeopardy as educators search for the rationale, tools and justification to demonstrate that standards are being addressed and assessed, and that concrete evidence has been gathered to show that students are making progress in those embedded standards. As a result, children have less opportunity than ever to gain real-life learning experiences in the natural world.
Our Opportunity
The State of Arizona is blessed with a perfect growing season for school and youth garden education. Most sites can plan on a winter and spring garden with maximum student and youth engagement. There is something growing in every region of the state, from Yuma to Flagstaff to Tucson to Phoenix. Learning in the garden classroom is an ideal opportunity to provide for our children at school, after school and at home with hands-on, sensory-based experiences that challenge, motivate and inspire them to literally dig deeper into their own creativity and desire to learn more.
The USDA-funded Digging Deeper Project was launched intentionally to provide exemplary Arizona school and youth garden programs with the tools for garden program assessment and to create a system for ongoing documentation. What has resulted is an increase in assessment literacy with a focus on the gardenfolio as the missing link for the ongoing gathering and monitoring of a purposeful garden program that meets the intended program criteria for success.
The Arizona Digging Deeper Program has been a working partnership between the Arizona Department of Education Team Nutrition, the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension of Maricopa County, and Food Works of Montepelier, Vermont. The project mission has been to help twelve existing Arizona school and youth gardening programs to more effectively articulate their program standards and criteria for success with quantifiable and verifiable evidence of student progress in embedded Arizona learning standards, including increased food literacy and rigorous application of the scientific method.
The teachers and youth leaders at the twelve sites that were chosen in a competitive grant process represent a leadership team of committed educators who understand the rich educational potential of gardening with children. These sites reflect a growing statewide movement to ground a child’s education in the natural cycles and rhythms that shape all members of our biotic community.
