CAMPUS
Tasty Transcript By Eliott Grover ’06
The bags Tamar Cunha brings each week to the Church of the Good Shepherd’s food shelter are stuffed with leafy greens, a rotating bounty of lettuce, swiss chard, and kale. “Soup kitchens need fresh produce, and that’s often a challenge,” says Cunha, Chair of Tabor’s Science Department. It’s a challenge that students in her aquaculture elective have helped address by building the hydroponic systems from which the greens that go to the shelter are harvested. Aquaculture is an upper-level science elective that’s part of
The second half of the course centers around a group project.
Tabor’s robust marine science program. It combines conceptual
Students can either conduct a research experiment or construct
knowledge with meaningful hands-on experience. At the start
their own hydroponic or aquaponic system. Whichever they
of the course, students learn about the history of aquaculture
chose, they must first present a detailed proposal to the class. As
and hydroponics and how different cultures have employed
part of that process, Cunha asks students to consider a daunt-
them. (Aquaculture is the controlled cultivation of aquatic
ing scenario. Imagine you finish the project, she tells them, and
organisms, such as fish; hydroponics is a type of farming that
everything has gone wrong.
grows plants without soil.) Once this theoretical framework is established, students have an opportunity to apply what they’ve learned.
40 TABOR TODAY | Spring 2022
“That really throws kids for a loop,” Cunha says. “It’s called a ‘pre-mortem.’ They have to think about what could fail in their
