Emma Lawson (Bachelor of Arts in Early Learning & Sociology)
This semesters Community Action Project was a great learning experience. As a group we came up with the idea of building a garden for a local elementary school, keeping in mind native plants and aboriginal artwork. We felt that a garden was an appropriate project to take on as it could provide a means of cross curricular and experiential learning for all students and staff. Despite facing a few unexpected obstacles and making adaptations to evolving ideas, we were able to come together as a team by taking on individual tasks, small group tasks and finally bringing all ends together to produce a beautiful garden to be proud of. While some of us worked on contacting elders, reaching out for donations, creating stones rich in aboriginal style art; others researched native plants and traditional uses, visited local nurseries and education centres, collected gardening materials and made a website and a short film. Having little knowledge of gardening, we learned the basics of how we can teach children to grow plants, what are native plants verses invasive plants, what are their uses and what does the earth provide us with. The best part of this project was seeing the students faces and hearing their comments when they saw the garden for the first time. They were so thankful and so inquisitive of what exactly we were doing and they clearly wanted to join in and get their hands dirty. This project exemplified inquiry based learning and showed me a new way of facilitating learning in and around the classroom which I hope to bring into my future teaching practice. I learned that when there's autonomy in our learning, we are more likely to have intrinsic motivation to succeed.
Please click here to look at my e-portfolio.
Please click here to look at my e-portfolio.