school Garden Partnerships: a guide to good practice

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Why have a garden partnership? Introduction The benefits of both school gardens and school partnerships are well known and these two elements can be brought together in a garden partnership. It works in two ways: l Partnerships can help us make our garden a focus for global education in our school – a window on the world. We can ask, “What can our partnership do for our garden?” l Our garden can provide a basis to make partnerships more productive – a global common language. We can ask “What can our garden do for our partnership?” We can also ask: l What can our garden partnership do for our students, our school, our community and our world? People everywhere need to find or produce food. Students, teachers and communities anywhere can grow crops, and gardens can be a link between rural and urban areas and between different parts of the world.

Benefits for learning The key to a successful educational partnership is the idea that we will learn from each other. ‘Global gardening’ gives us tools to help us with teaching and learning. Our outdoor classroom, with its practical activities and less formal setting, can help all students to engage in a world-wise education. We will also become more self-aware as we improve our communication skills, speaking and listening to partners: real people with real-life information. The soil and water that we manage, the crops we grow and the methods we use can become a medium for understanding the wider world. Our garden partnership will support and enrich our teaching of curriculum subjects. In particular it will be a vehicle for global citizenship education, environmental management and conservation, and sustainable development and living. It also helps us think about food security and healthy lifestyles.

Using gardens as a basis for partnership, or focussing a partnership on gardening, is quite new, but has very real potential benefits for education and learning, for schools and communities. See Appendix 3: Resoures, p20, for programmes to find partnership schools.

What does a ‘garden’ mean to us? It means slightly different things around the world, and depending on how we live – a city or town, a farming area, a pastoral or hunting community – the garden will have a different form. We need a flexible idea of gardens – an outdoor space where plant or animal food (and perhaps medicines and other useful products from plants) is grown. In many cases this will include natural features (eg trees) as well as those which we plant. It will often be important for our garden to reflect the environment and land-uses of the place where we live.

Benefits for schools and communities... and the world A garden partnership can be set at the heart of a school, as a core activity. If it is embedded in school life, it will enhance the school’s identity and profile, becoming a bridge between local community and the wider world, with the garden a common ground for local and international knowledge. It can be the place where students, staff and community come together and engage with real global issues of sustainability, climate change and social justice.

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NB These notes are intended for use by schools anywhere in the world. They have been prepared for partnerships between two schools. However, with minimum adjustment they should be useful for partnerships involving more than two schools.


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