December 27th, 2024

Rethinking Sustainability through Accessibility: An ADA Garden to Invite the Languaging of Embodied Local Ecologies

By Nicole Taylor

Link to the JSE December 2024 CECR Issue Table of Contents

Taylor JSE Dec 2024 CECR Issue PDF

Abstract: This case study invites a collaborative exploration with Exceptional Learners (ELs) in the Transition from School to Work (TSW) program, and Multilingual Learners (MLs) in the IB Spanish language class and the Spanish for Spanish Speakers class at Coconino High School, to create an ADA accessible garden under the leadership of EL students. The partners in this collaboration included Special Education students, Spanish Language students, and the students in a Woods, Career and Technical Education (CTE) class. The Community Engaged Critical Research (CECR) case study worked through inclusion and demonstrated how working across content and ability amplifies voices that may have been silenced in exclusionary models of education. Engaging participant observation, action research, and relational qualitative approaches, this case study moved through a project-based, co-created learning process to inspire student growth in awareness and connection to local ecologies, environment, and sustainability. In addition, building from Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Teaching (CRST), Sustainability Education, and Critical Disabilities Studies (CDS), this case study offers additive perspectives of ELs and MLs in Sustainability Education, that may have been left out. The collaboration across ability and languages encouraged all participants to embody a community focus and local ecology in the process of creating a garden and path of inclusion, together.

Keywords: Sustainability Education, Multilingual Learners, Critical Disability Studies, Project-Based, Community, Culturally Responsive.

 

Author note: Francy Solarte is a Spanish language educator at Coconino High School with a MA in Teaching Spanish – Spanish Education from Northern Arizona University. She is originally from Columbia, is a proud mother, and she is passionate about project-based learning, equity, and sustainability. Francy was an essential collaboration partner for the ADA accessible garden project and I am grateful for her willingness to work on this project with me and with students—creating a space of languaging and inclusion.

 

Laying the Path of Accessibility

The garden, located in Flagstaff, Arizona, at Coconino High School (CHS), one of two local high schools, sits at the base of the San Francisco Peaks, around 7,000 feet elevation, in a neighborhood called Sunny Side. The CHS community consists of around 1,500 9-12 grade students from diverse cultural backgrounds with about 60% of the population identified as Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC). Some of the ethnicities more widely represented include Navajo (Diné), Hopi, Hualapai, Havasupai, Kaibab-Paiute, among other Indigenous peoples, and a growing Latina/o/x population. The mountain that towers over Flagstaff and the garden is also called Dookʼoʼoosłííd in Diné bizaad. Beyond English, Spanish is a growing “majority minority” language in the school.

The garden, a small space located at the back of the main school building, surrounded by asphalt parking lot and a chain-link fence, had been part of the Transition from School to Work (TSW) Program for many years. TSW is part of Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) and the Arizona Department of Economic Security (DES), and many public high schools house the program for students with (dis)abilities to assist in their transitioning from high school to work.

On our first day in the garden, a warm August day when the sun tilted sideways, I was with a small group of five students, who were excited to get outside and see what was happening in the space. The students in TSW at CHS were a neurodiverse and varied ability population, in grades 9-12. As part of the TSW team, I had been hired to work with students in the garden as one of the job explorations for students in the program.

On this first day, I wanted students to get a lay of the land, and to begin to winterize the space. However, the year before, the garden had been planted with random crops and, being abandoned all summer, was overgrown with weeds, a few ripe strawberries, and crow pecked corn. Student excitement soon turned to frustration. As the sun beat down, students tripped over sunken wood garden beds, caught their legs on corn stalks, and tripped on uneven ground. There was fear moving through the space, and about bending down to pull weeds. This experience left me feeling defeated, like I had failed to present a positive space for students.

Questions filtered into my mind after this experience. I thought about the garden space and its frustrating impact for Exceptional Learners (ELs). I wondered, how a garden — part of what one thinks of as a potential learning space for sustainability education — could be sustainable, if it was not accessible? This questioning led me to a project proposal for an American with Disabilities Act (ADA) accessible garden and to a larger inquiry about the necessity for accessibility as part of sustainability.

The TSW program at CHS and the EL students who participate in the program became a focus because the garden space had been designated for them, but was not built with their needs in mind. It is a goal of the Flagstaff Unified School District (FUSD) to create greater inclusion with programs like TSW, which are designed to support students who have Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) that identify needed accommodations due to learning or physical (dis)abilities, and students with 504 plans which indicate students with social or behavior accommodations. With the inclusion goal in mind, and with the support of the TSW director, I decided to apply for a micro-grant through the FUSD Foundation Grants for teachers, to build a more accessible garden. The grant highlighted a collaboration between TSW students and the students in the Spanish language International Baccalaureate (IB) track and Spanish for Spanish speakers’ class during the school year 22/23. The Spanish language teacher, Francy Solarte, wanted to work together to introduce a unit on sustainability and have her students experience planting and growing sustainably in Flagstaff. After our initial meetings, we both understood that the project would need to evolve around accessibility. Our work together required stepping into the perspective of students in TSW and their varied abilities and needs. Francy and I decided we would center ELs in TSW and simultaneously center languaging, communicating and meaning making across languages and abilities. In addition, I reached out to the Woods teacher who was part of the CHS Career and Technical Education (CTE) program. The Woods teacher agreed to work with us to have his students build a raised, ADA wheelchair accessible or standing, garden bed.

As the team was set, the learning could begin! I started building background knowledge with the students in TSW. This learning focused on accessibility, critical (dis)ability awareness, and work (jobs) connected to the garden. Throughout the winter months, the students made game boards about garden jobs, mapped out the garden space, investigated ADA accessible garden paths and gardens, and began researching what to plant in Flagstaff, a climate not easy to navigate with high altitude and a short growing season.

The students decided to grow corn, beans, and squash after learning about traditional and local “Three Sisters” growing methods. They also chose to plant cucumbers, zucchinis, kale, broccoli, jalapenos, basil, and tomatoes, in part because they enjoyed these foods and in part because they learned that these may grow well in our garden and climate. Students then created a vision board filled with fruits and vegetables they love, and pictures of the paths and garden beds they needed and wanted. This vision board stayed visible all Winter and into the Spring as a guide to what they hoped to build.

Research Goal

As the weather turned and Spring arrived, the work in the garden began to materialize. The TSW students built a garden path with donated pavers from a local business, Blocklite, learned about leveling the earth, utilized teamwork, and found ways to communicate about their needs, likes, and dislikes in the garden space. They built a relationship with this small patch of garden in a sea of parking lot. Their work and the beginning transformation of the garden led to an interest in the following question:

What awareness will Exceptional Learners (ELs) and Multilingual Learners (MLs) gain about their local environment, their relationship to local ecologies and each other, and understanding of sustainability, by participating in the creation of an ADA accessible garden?

This action and participant research hoped to invite a greater connection to local ecologies for ELs and MLs, through project-based and experiential learning. I wanted to invite embodiment of ecologies and greater self-determination (Smith, 1999). The research goal envisioned that if ELs and MLs participated in creating a space accessible to them, they may broaden their understanding of how they belong in the learning of sustainability and with local ecologies, and with each other – across ability. In addition, I hoped that this experience would invite greater voice and action for a world that includes ELs and MLs and spaces that can be led by their perspectives.

Toward Transdisciplinary Education

“Amplify don’t simplify!”  – Walqui & Van Lier (2010)

In an exploration of educational practices and spaces that lay a foundation for this Community Engaged Critical Research (CECR) case study, perspectives, theories, and practices, in the fields of Critical Pedagogy, Second Language Acquisition, Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Pedagogy, and Critical Disability Studies, were considered. The key takeaways from the literature include the importance of learning through “who” students are and their multimodal literacies as well as learning through language and cultural funds of knowledge, which may require a spiraled pedagogical approach that moves with learners’ abilities and languages. In addition, the literature suggests a necessity to center ELs and MLs beyond inclusion and toward leadership. Finally, Critical Disability Studies (CDS) advocates for inclusion practices in sustainability. The main focus being that ELs must be invited to see themselves in the world of sustainability as well as engage in critical conversations about their lived experiences.

Criticality, Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Teaching, and “Doing” Language
This case study worked to engage students in learning by inviting who they are and still maintaining critical thinking through language, content, and across ability. According to Muhammad (2020) focus on creating a Historically Relevant Literacy (HRL) and Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Pedagogy (CRSP) across content, is one of raising the voices and identity of BIPOC students. However, this call is intricately connected with ELs and MLs and the invitation to learn through identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and joy. Muhammad suggested that “pedagogy must be viewed as both an art (imagination and creativity) and a science (theory, strategies, and methods of instruction)” and she called for a curriculum and teaching with students that engages “histories, identities, and literacies” (pp. 50-51). The approaches in HRL are invitations for all education to include inquiry through “who” students are, their experiences, their perspectives, their abilities, and their multimodal literacies.

Like Muhammad, Aída Walqui and George Bunch (2019) challenged educators to “design activities, instruction materials, lessons, and units that amplify opportunities for students to engage with rich, meaningful, and challenging language and content” (p.2). While language and MLs are the focus of Walqui and Bunch, their proposed spiraled curriculum is one that also speaks directly to ELs and to multimodal learning. In a spiraled curriculum, the key tenets are that of quality teaching and learning for all learners, including development that emerges in social interaction, scaffolded learning, substantive and generative practices, simultaneous development of conceptual, analytical, and language practice, and contextual and supported learning opportunities (p.23). The spiraled approach begins and ends with student identity and relevant experiences. This exchange and theoretical circling, helixes and spirals like fractals in nature and with movement like dancing.

According to Martin (2023) in his work with neurodiverse learners through poetry, a neurodiversity and varied ability learning is like a dance (pp.1-2). Both like and unlike the spiral of Walqui and Bunch, the dance Martin described builds upon itself, but is not spiral shaped for all learners. Instead, Martin described this learning as a “dance of conversation” and one that is set in reciprocity and movement (p. 3). Martin also highlighted the learning through languaging or doing language, a concept originating in the teaching with MLs and applied by Martin in the languaging with neurodiverse students (Garcia, et al., 2018). The connections between languaging, and cultural and historically relevant pedagogy helps set the stage for this case study and the work of students to engage through their own identities and needs, by doing, building, and indeed, languaging through the process.

Exceptional Learners and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
The roots of Muhammad’s (2020) HRL, and Walqui and Bunch’s Amplified Curriculum, can be traced to Gloria Ladson-Billings (1994) work to define and promote Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) (Lavin, et al., 2022, p.7). According to Lavin, et al., Ladson-Billing “observed that effective teachers continuously did three things: (a) they focused on student learning, not on student assessments or evaluating, (b) they understood their own cultural background, the background of their students, and taught them how to interact with people from different cultures (e.g., being culturally competent), and (c) they made the lessons relevant to the students’ daily lives (e.g., developed the students’ critical consciousness)” (p.8).

This focus of CRP is important to ELs and MLs in the context of this case study because it promotes teaching and learning practices that work with students’ learning, culture, and experience, and because it offers a platform away from a dominant narrative and a “single story” (Adichie, 2009). Lavin, et al. suggested that “special education cannot fall into the fallacy of the single story…promulgated by the dominant narrative” (p.10). Indeed, “children with disabilities remain othered in schooling structures despite verbal commitments to inclusion…in other words, children with disabilities are often treated differently, whether being removed from mainstream settings or treated as objects of sympathy” (Lavin, et al., p. 6). This is true too for MLs in many schools, with English only models of language learning, or with stigmas attached to specialized language programs.

In this case study it was also necessary to root in CRP while reaching for Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP). The call for CSP extends teaching practices and learning engagements from responding to the students in our collaboration, toward sustaining cultural heritages, languages, and modalities (Paris & Alim, 2017). This shift of consideration invites cultural funds of knowledge into the learning but also must include, according to Paris and Alim (2014) greater criticality and raise critical consciousness. Engaging in this critical dialogue with ourselves and within our own spheres of influence can require action against the perpetuation of deficit models that include othering of abilities and languages. Instead, Paris and Alim suggested reaching for a liberating education and they “envision new forms of teaching and learning…to explore, honor, extend, and at times, problematize” spaces of educational practice (p. 86).

Integrating CRP and CSP best practices, invites movement toward new narratives in Special Education (SPED), with ELs, and in language classrooms with MLs, elevating learning, while simultaneously re-centering voice, perspective, and power away from a “majoritarian” landscape (Solorzano and Yosso, 2016). According to O’Brien, et al., (2022) inclusive research is a paradigm that transfers “power from those who were once the ‘researched’ to being and becoming the ‘researchers’…this paradigm [works] to redress the exclusion of people with intellectual disability as partners in the research process” through accessible methodologies, storytelling, and emerging new models of inclusive research (p.1). It is a process of inviting students and all learners as co-creators of the learning and an honoring of a diversity of repertoires.

Sustainability Education, Inclusion, and Critical Disability Studies
Considering SPED with ELs, Sustainability Education has not been the most inclusive. According to Clark (2013) “the vast majority of [sustainability] programs have been primarily geared towards and utilized by general education teachers and students. Few programs target special populations, and minimal literature highlights special educators, those working with students with special needs, finding ways to help students in their classroom blossom into ecologically knowledgeable, sustainably-living adults” (p.38). This case study presented an opportunity to add greater awareness and possibility of inclusion to the field of Sustainability Education.

In addition, the focus of this case study is additive and comparative with research conducted by Kankainen et al., (2016) with a focus on “action research in which sixteen 9th-graders, who studied in a special education classroom, participated.” Kankainen et al., conducted research through thematic units of inquiry, sustainability project-based learning, and aimed at increasing awareness and connection to sustainability for students in SPED (Kankainen et al.). However, the difference between Kankainen et al., and the case study presented here, is that the focus-students collaborated with a diversity of students across the school landscape, including ability and language. This case study offered students in TSW an opportunity to work on a project they created and planned with students in Spanish language classes, and students in the CTE Woods class, many of whom are not part of SPED at the high school, nor do they have IEPs. This inclusive model is one suggested by Stavrianos (2016) who explained that “inclusion and the pedagogy of environmental education” can “facilitate positive development of self-esteem, peer to peer socialization, as well as teacher-student relationships and a positive attitude toward school.” Embracing and amplifying inclusion are fundamental as it seeks student self-determination, healing, and critical care.

Taking this idea of inclusion a step farther, Critical Disability Studies (CDS) proposes a “next” in methodology and research around peoples with (dis)abilities. As Schalk (2017) explained, CDS is moving the study of (dis)abilities to a study with and by peoples with (dis)abilities. In addition, CDS is being presented as a critical methodology that when incorporated into teaching can help students “understand (dis)ability as a social system that impacts all of us in a wide variety of systematic quotidian ways” (Schalk, p. 3). The idea is that by integrating a criticality with (dis)ability studies in our education systems and through inclusive learning opportunities, all students of varying abilities and ableness begin to see the systems of othering and take action to make change.

To conclude, the work in this CECR case study attempted to bridge the chasms and disconnect between sustainability and accessibility through the processes of transdisciplinary education, embraced across content and ability, through language, and toward community. The landscape for such a case study considered that ELs and MLs are often othered out of sustainability spaces and that neurodiverse, varied ability voices, as well as voices whose languages will not be “tamed” are often marginalized (Anzaldua, 1987, Garcia & Kleifgen, 2018, and Solórzano & Yosso, 2016). In addition, spaces of commonality and connection were included to move beyond differences and start building a more inclusive path.

Inclusion Methods

The methods used in this CECR case study included a praxis-based participant observation and relational qualitative approaches. These included action research with students, doing the learning and language with all involved in participatory, performative, and multimodal ways. In addition, with my collaborative partner, Francy Solarte, we used interpretive pedagogies and inquiry practice including reflective conversations with students and each other. The methods that informed this case study, offered spaces for questioning, engaged embodied ecologies, and provided the opportunity for an “othered” population within a colonial education system to be centered.

In order to holistically address the research question, I looked to the “next” in research methodology including to Denzin and Lincoln’s (2008) decolonizing education, that “asks the social sciences and the humanities [to] become sites for critical conversations about democracy, race, gender, class, nation-states, globalization, freedom, and community” (p. 9). This is the baton passing from critical Pedagogy via Freire (1970). In this call, I see the spaces of possibility, including methodologies that “embrace an ethics of truth grounded in love, care, hope, and forgiveness” (Denzin & Lincoln, p. 6).

This project worked to engage CECR with active reflexivity and positionality that “embodies the emancipatory, empowering values of critical pedagogy” and actively worked to enact and engage self-determination (Denzin &Lincoln, p.9). It engaged post-positivist methodologies, which recognize “an infinitely complex [world] without a defined ‘truth’…and is unlikely to be captured by statistics alone” (O’Leary, 2017, p.7). I focused on participatory collaborative methodology that uproots “sedimented meanings and normative traditions” in the context of education, specifically Special Education and language education (Conquergood, 1998, p.32 as cited in Denzin & Lincoln, 2008, p.13).

According to Denzin and Lincoln (2008), “within this radical pedagogical space, the performative and the political intersect on the terrain of a praxis-based ethic” (p.13). Again, applying the critical pedagogy and related critical methodologies, must be based in the principles of “involving cultural politics, political economy, and critical theory” and invite a “relational view of knowledge” that conceives human agency, “in active terms” (Denzin & Lincoln, p.15). This includes CDS and the application of criticality in the teaching and learning in this case study. By centering the research in CECR and critical methods, the learning “[invited] a space where the work of resistance, critique, and empowerment can occur” (Denzin &Lincoln, p. 9). The students engaged in this ADA garden project, shaped their embodied empowerment and a space of voices.

Result-ing in Languaging

“The margins define the center” – bell hooks

In an effort to center a conversation about sustainability requires accessibility, and amplify voices, experiences, and perspectives of ELs and MLs, in the context of Sustainability Education, I present observations, stories, and student feedback of the ADA garden project at CHS. This culturally responsive and sustaining project worked to locate power within community and the “doing” of language. In considering the reflections of students and teacher observations, I share how students who may be “othered” in many education systems and settings, when offered a collaborative leadership role, embraced communication across languages, grew in compassion and understanding for varied abilities and awareness of cultural funds of knowledge, and inquired about the more-than-human world, including questions about plant varieties, names, and care. Finally, I offer an unexpected result of students’ expressed awareness toward personal and communal Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and well-being.

Communication Across Languages
The air was crisp on the day we received the pavers for our ADA accessible path from Blocklite. Students in the TSW program watched with curiosity as the forklift placed two large pallets next to the fence of the garden. Once the delivery was complete, it was time for students and staff to get to work, moving the pavers into the garden. Unfortunately, the delivery drop was at the opposite end of the garden where we did not have an entrance. While I was thinking through how to get the pavers around to the other side and into the garden, one student, without verbalizing, began to pass the pavers through a hole in the fence to another student who was already inside the garden. The hole was just big enough for the pavers. Then, without direction from any teacher, the students organized themselves in a line, passing one paver at a time from hand-to-hand and then through the hole to other students, who then continued passing and stacking the pavers inside the garden.

This non-verbal communication, or embodied languaging, where gesture, action and somatic synchronizing become part of the language landscape, occurred again when TSW students and IB Spanish language students were in the garden space together. Francy and I witnessed students quietly pulling weeds and sitting next to each other as though a conversation was occurring in silence and motion. We saw one student laying a friendly hand upon another’s shoulder to reassure them when they were having a hard day, and students taking turns shoveling, pulling weeds and holding the garbage bags. There was pointing to seed placement, non-verbalized exchanges in gesture and glance, and verbalized expressions in English and Spanish, and languaging throughout the garden.

Depending on the context, the question, or the conversation, students were languaging and utilizing their multiple repertoires. According to Stornaiuolo, Smith, and Phillips (2017) transliteracies and translanguaging can be invited in “the dynamic material nature of meaning making in activity” (as cited in Garcia & Kleifgen, 2019, p.6). Indeed the students in the garden moved their language through “meaning making, feeling, intensity, and excitement…[and through] the imaginaries of students to make connections across what are perceived and encoded as separate systems” (Garcia & Kleifgen, 2019, p. 8). This code-meshing was encouraged and both Francy and I consciously took a critical metalinguistic and translanguaging stance as educators, working to ensure a space for multiple languages to be seeded and to grow.

Development of Embodied Local Ecologies and Cultural Funds of Knowledge
The garden project at CHS worked to leverage learning through students embodied languaging and through their cultural “funds of knowledge” (Moll, 1992).  In this effort I tried to create a space that was simultaneously responsive and sustaining, where students felt confident in their understanding and advocacy for their own needs, could express their connection to the space through multiple modality languaging, and could explore or honor their own cultural funds of knowledge. In addition, there was an attempt to make the garden a microcosm of “local ecology” and a place conscious space where students would become more familiar with the land and perhaps develop an experiential relationship, if not a knowledge, of the space and sustainability (Gruenewald, 2003 and Orr, 2005).

For some students in the TSW program, it was through co-creator leadership roles that they shined in developing a greater awareness of the garden space and how it could become shaped and enacted toward their own embodied experiences. This was witnessed in the measuring and mapping of the space, and the research considering ADA garden paths and garden bed design. For others, it was witnessed in the joy that was expressed when planting, watering, weeding, composting, raking, and “being” in the garden. For example, one student became enamored with herbs – the plants, the words, the smells, the textures. Out in the garden, on the day students planted the basil starts, one student danced “basil” holding the leaf to their nose, smiling and spinning and almost singing. Still others, on a hot day of the TSW summer program, pretended to be a seed of their favorite plants. Their bodies shrank down to the earth and then a fellow student watered them with the hose and they danced and grew.

Francy and I also witnessed many students find connections between the plants or the act of gardening, with their own cultural funds of knowledge. One student shared they knew how to shovel because their dad was a landscaper. Another student talked of the flowers their mom planted in their yard. Still another shared a story about his family who farmed in Mexico. Students talked about the connection between specific herbs being planted and their memories of the herbs from homelands and home meals. A Diné student shared, “I feel happy when I go to the garden. I’m very immersed in my Navajo culture and being in the garden I feel more in tune with the earth.”

Sustainability Inquiry
Inquiry flourished in this garden project and students demonstrated curiosity and wonder in multiple ways. In the TSW classroom, the students were drawn each day to observe the starter plants they were growing under a grow lamp. They would spray the leaves with water, point to a particular plant and ask, “Who is that?” On one occasion, the students and the staff were all huddled around the plant starts, singing to them. One student was curious why they were singing. Another student explained, “It helps them grow.” These displays of curiosity and affection expressed an interest to learn more about plants and how to care for them. It indicated the possibility of relationship and a possible awareness of responsibility, intra-connection, and kinship (Salmon, E., 2015, Taylor, C., 2018, & Barad, K., 2007).

On another occasion, students from TSW and the IB Spanish language class worked together to create garden signs. The inquiry about names and care again dominated the conversation. Students posed questions about how to say the names of the plants in multiple languages. They wrote the names in Spanish and English, and then in other languages that they researched. They made connections to their own cultural heritages and the naming. I recorded students asking, “How do you say ‘runner beans’ in Spanish?” Or, “How do you say ‘kale’?”  Other students asked about where certain plants grow best and if all plants needed the same things to live. These inquiries opened the discussion toward language variations in different places. They opened the conversation toward sustainability, local environments, and new connections between humans and more-than-humans in place, and between places (Gruenewald, 2003).

According to Kayumova & Tippins (2021) it is possible to redefine spaces for possibility and they suggested, “these are spaces of collective transformations where youth engage in learning science and sustainability through relational perspectives and acknowledge entangled relations of humans and more-than-humans, as they tap into each other’s humanity, history, culture, and knowledge in ways that challenge normativity” (Love, 2019 as cited in Kyaumova & Tippins, 2021, p. 826).  Francy and I witnessed this transformational possibility for multilingual, neurodiverse, and varied ability students as they learned and worked together.

Social Emotional Learning (SEL)
On one of the last days in Spring, when students from the Spanish for Spanish speakers’ class and students from TSW were together in the garden, the blue-sky was overhead and the wind died down. Fingertips delicately removed broccoli, kale, basil, and zucchini starts from their trays. Eyes searched root systems and noses smelled herbs. Most of the high school students had never seen anything grow from seed, nor had they seen the web of roots that connect each living plant to the earth. In this moment, language spiraled and so did something unexpected –– Joy. Students were happy to be outside, talking with each other, “doing” their learning. In the collection of student responses, this joy and feelings of calm, contentment, and ease jumped out. Here are some of the student reflections:

“I really like going to the garden. It’s really fun and a nice brain break from my other classes. I’ve learned names of a lot of different fruits and vegetables and the tools in the garden.”

“Going to the garden puts me in a good mood. I’ve learned more about plants and how to handle them. This might help me to work on my personal garden.”

“When I go to the garden, I feel so relaxed. I look forward to it every week. It allows me to not stress about anything. I have learned so much.”

“I love the garden. It is a nice change instead of staying inside.”

In addition, students shared their appreciation for the opportunity to connect with friends, make new friends, and talk together across languages. Students shared:

“I liked that we spent time with new people, we worked together and thanks to that, the garden now is very beautiful.”

“I liked that we collaborated with other students to help the community and it was a good cause”

“I like looking at everything that was accomplished in a small amount of time and got to know new people.”

“I liked that I could speak my native language with new people.”

“It was good meeting new people and it was relaxing to work outdoors.”

Student comments drew attention to a connection with the key components of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) outlined by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL, 2024). Specifically, CASEL SEL framework centers self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making (CASEL, 2024). Students voiced and written reflections about the garden project and experience demonstrate social awareness and “the abilities to understand perspectives of and empathize with others, including those from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and contexts” (CASEL, 2024). Also, there is evidence of relationship skills and the ability to “navigate settings with diverse individuals and groups,” and self-awareness as students expressed their own emotions, thoughts, and values (CASEL, 2024).

While an SEL focus was not a specific goal, the result was evident and demonstrates how this garden project was additive and inspiring for students. According to Anzaldua (2002) “transformation occurs in this in-between space, an unstable unpredictable precarious, always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries” (p.1). Francy and I had worked to invite a space with such permeable boundaries, in the margins of a school campus, with those often marginalized, and we discovered unexpected collaborations, friendships, and care.

 

 

 

 

 

Discussion

This project, as a CECR case study demonstrated that not only is it important to begin with “who” participants are, but also “how” they communicate. The non-verbal communication observed in the collaborative work in the garden, as well as the translanguaging between Spanish and English, underlines how important it is to consider embodied communication in research approaches. It was through this communication awareness and focus that relationships could be formed and a community was in action together. The project also demonstrated how cultural funds of knowledge, multiple modality literacies, and participatory practices invite an emergent and generative inquiry in CECR and may be necessary for community engaged research to reflect community goals. In this case study, this was seen with ELs as leaders, designers, and builders of a garden, meant for them.

In reflection, I had set out to ignite learning, imagination, and develop an embodied knowing of local ecologies around the idea that sustainability requires accessibility. However, the collaborative project with TSW students, Spanish language students, Woods CTE students, and between teachers, grew into a project that literally built a path toward inclusion. Engaging project-based learning and creation of an ADA garden with a diversity of students, developed greater awareness of how teachers and students are part of local ecologies, both in the garden, the environment of place, and within a community—together. In addition, the enjoyment students expressed in being outside, learning about plants they had only ever seen in pictures, planting seeds for the first time, and more generally enjoying the act of gardening and communicating, was at the heart of experiences.

This project was one of growth, trying out ways of teaching and co-creating with students and co-teaching across content. We did not arrive as experts, but rather as co-learners, seeking to work through community engagement. Through creating a curriculum with greater clarity and criticality, with students in an emergent approach, always with the lens of  critical pedagogy, we tried to be culturally responsive and sustaining. For example, Francy and I co-presented to the students in the IB Spanish and Spanish for Spanish speakers’ classes, a mini-lesson about the American with Disabilities Act (ADA), and about the idea of inclusion, diversity, and sustainability. The lesson took the inquiry one step farther and asked students to consider how language was also an accessibility issue. Through discussion, students witnessed their story of language as part of a story about access. Then, I followed this with a mini-lesson for the students in TSW about self-advocacy, disability awareness, and accessibility. This work attempted to invite students to criticality and social justice through ownership and empowerment for the project, and worked to honor and acknowledge student repertoires, knowledge, and stories.

Alvarez (2017) asked, what happens if we, as teachers, include these powerful language skills that center student expertise and ability, in our teaching and learning? What if teachers reconfigured our language spaces as “plurilingual dimensions” or “‘translanguaging events’ that [reflect] the dynamic practices of individuals…” (p.4). Francy and I worked to begin with acknowledging student expertise and “cultural funds of knowledge,” and to open the learning space for more student voice, learning risk-taking, feedback, and growth mind-set (Moll, et al., 1992). The garden project centered the expertise of ELs and their own knowledge about their needs. The result was greater access, greater awareness of the diversity of abilities, greater advocacy for critical care across abilities, and expressions of joy.

In addition, the root of care connects the act of language to community-based learning opportunities, to place-based or place-conscious pedagogy, and culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy, and can invite the “doing” of language in the context of critical care. Student languaging occurred throughout the project from the planning of the garden in classroom contexts to the shared work together in the garden. As students joined together in the garden space, pulling weeds, moving dirt, laying pavers, and shaping the space, “doing” language became a reality. Spanish, English, neurodiverse, and multimodal languaging reverberated and rhythmed.

Conclusion

Some days I catch glimpse of the hurdy-gurdy path I make


through this garden: ooh! the gooseberries aglow,


ooh! the lemon balm tufting up, ooh! wasps swilling the golden florets


of bolted kale, and Good Lord the strawberry flowers


are the pursed lips of ghosts


I want to know. Yes, today I am on my belly


for that scant perfume, this invisible parade


of dying and bloom.

— Ross Gay

This case study opens and continues with “spaces of possibility” becoming reality in the work to create learning ecologies with students across language, experience, ability, and perspective. As educators aspiring to change-makers, Francy and I tried to re-define the space of learning for neurodiverse, varied ability, and multilingual students. We witnessed students challenge normativity and their entanglement of relations in action, with each other and with the garden.

On the last day in the garden, some students laid on the warm garden path and quietly shared space, while others continued to talk about future plans for the next year including trips to Spanish speaking countries and vacation. Still others, looked at the sky, uttered the words they had been loving, “bark chips, Basil” over and over. Everyone made room for each other and space grew and shrank like the seasons move and cycle. All of us breathed in and out and watched carpenter ants make galleries in the wood garden beds, watched beans sprout their tendrils toward the chain-link fence, heard birds building a nest in the eaves, smelled water quenching thirsty soil and roots, and listened to the spiraling languaging — silence — gesture — stillness.

 

References

Adichie, Ngozi Chimamanda. (2009). “The Danger of a Single Story.” TED [Video]. You Tube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg

Alvarez, S. (2017). Brokering Literacies: Child Language Brokering in Mexican Immigrant Families. Community Literacy Journal. Spring. Pp. 1-15.

American Psychological Association. American Psychological Association ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct (2002).

Barad, K., (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.

Brown, A.M. (2017). Emergent Strategy: Shaping change, Changing Worlds. AK Press

CASEL (2024). Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning.  https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/what-is-the-casel-framework/#social-emotional-learning

Clark, K.E. (2013). Ecological Intelligence and Sustainability Education in Special Education. Multicultural Education (Fall) Sustainability Education pp. 38-45.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1045851.pdf

Darder, A. (2017). Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love. Routledge

DeNicolo, C.P., et al. (March 2017). Critical Care and Problematizing Sense of School Belonging as a Response to Inequality for Immigrants and Children of Immigrants. Review of Research in Education, v41 n1 p500-530.

Denzin, N. K. & Lincoln, Y. S. (2008). The Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, & Smith, L T. (Eds.), London: Sage.

Eisenstein, C. (2018). Climate: A New Story. Atlantic Books.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum.

Garcia, O. & Kleifgen, J.A. (2018).  Educating Emergent Bilinguals: Policies, Programs, and Practices for English Learners.  Teachers College Press; 2nd edition.

Garcia, O. & Kleifgen, J.A. (2019). Translanguaging and Literacies. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(4), pp.553-571 | doi:10.1002/rrq.286. International Literacy Association.

Gillborn D., and Lason-Billings G. (Eds).  Foundation Of Critical Race Theory In Education.  (p. 127-142). New York and London: Routledge.

Griffiths, M. (2009). Critical approaches in qualitative educational research: The relation of some theoretical and methodological approaches to these issues. Edinburgh Research Explorer. The University of Edinburgh.

Haines, S. (2019). The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing, and Social Justice. North Atlantic Books

Kankainen, T., Määttä, K., & Uusiautti, S. (2016). Will a sustainable lifestyle fit as a part of special education? [Abstract]. International Journal of Research Studies in Education. 5.10.5861/ijrse.2016.1413.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African American children. Jossey-Bass.

Lavin, C.E., Jordan, A.W., & Francis, G.L. (2021). Back to Basics: Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in Special Education. High School Journal, 105(1), 5.

Martin, C. (2023). May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism, and our Neurodiverse Future.  Harper One.

Moll, L.C., et al. (1992). Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms. Theory Into Practice, Vol. XXXI, 132-141.

Muhammad, G. (2020). Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy.  Scholastic.

National Academy of Sciences (2009). Selections from On being a scientist: A guide to responsible conduct in research (Third edition). The National Academies Press.

O’Brien, P., et al. (2023). Inclusive Research: Is the Road More or Less Well Travelled?  MDPI – Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute. https://doi-org.prescottcollege.idm.oclc.org/10.3390/books978-3-0365-6309-1

O’Leary, Z. (2017). The essential guide to doing your research project (3rd ed.). Sage Publications.

Paris, D. & Samy Alim, H. (2014). What Are We Seeking to Sustain Through Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy? A Loving Critique Forward. Harvard Educational Review. Vol. 84 No. 1 Spring.

Paris, D. & Alim, H. (2017). Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies:Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World. Teachers College Press.

Salmon, E. (2015). Teaching Kincentric Ecology in an Urban Environment. Journal of Sustainability Education.

Sami Schalk. (2017). Critical Disability Studies as Methodology. Lateral, 6(1). https://doi-org.prescottcollege.idm.oclc.org/10.25158/L6.1.13

Smith, L. T. (1999). Selections from Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books.

Soedirgo, J. & Glas, A. (2020). Toward active reflexivity: Positionality and practice in the production of knowledge. Political Science & Politics, 53(3), 527-531. doi:10.1017/s1049096519002233

Solórzano, D.G. & Yosso, T.J. (2016). Critical Race Methodology: Counter-Storytelling as an Analytical Framework for Educational Research. In Taylor, E., Gillborn, D., & Ladson-Billings, G. (Eds). Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education (pp. 127-142). Routledge.

Stavrianos, A. (2016). Green inclusion: biophilia as a necessity [abstract]. British Journal of Special Education, 43(4), 416–429. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8578.12155

Stornaiuolo, A., Smith, A., & Phillips, N.C. (2017). Developing a Transliteracies Framework for a Connected World. Journal of Literacy Research. Vol. 49(1) 68-91. SAGE.

Taylor, C. (2018). Each Intra-Action Matters: Towards a Posthuman Ethics for Englarging Response-ability in Higher Education Pedagogic Practice-ings. In Bozalek, V. et al. (Eds.), Socially Just Pedagogies: Posthumanist, Feminist and Materialist Perspectives in Higher Education (pgs. 81-96). Bloomsbury.

Walqui, A. & Bunch, G.C. (2019). Amplifying the Curriculum: Designing Quality Learning Opportunities for English Learners. Teachers College Press, Columbia University.

Yosso, T.J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education. Vol. 8, 69

• share:
• Recommend on Facebook
• Tweet this