In Sustainability Education’s Gift: Learning Patterns and Relationships, Williams (2008) advocates shifting from “mechanistic and technocratic worldviews” toward more holistic approaches grounded in systems thinking. From this perspective, the whole can only be understood through the relationships between its parts, allowing the fragmentation created by mechanistic thinking to fall away. Williams describes this capacity to learn in patterns and relationships as sustainability education’s “gift,” and illustrates it through a case study of Learning Gardens, a garden-based education program in Portland schools. As students engage in this kind of learning, they begin making meaningful connections among spiders, plants, hunger, and community, linking ecological and human systems. The program also addresses broader issues such as obesity, food insecurity, disconnection from nature, and achievement gaps through learning experiences that are multicultural, multidisciplinary, multisensory, and intergenerational.
“Education is the ability to perceive the hidden connections between phenomena,” writes Vaclav Havel. This line, placed immediately after the abstract, resonated deeply with me and feels like an antidote to rote learning and the individualistic ways of thinking that permeate our society. Framing education as learning to see connections raises important questions: Is being educated the same as being able to recognize relationships between things, or is this something schools must intentionally teach? One place where seeing connections matters deeply is in understanding climate change, where individual choices create collective consequences. Yet ecological literacy has not been prioritized in schools, even though systems thinking makes these connections impossible to ignore.
When we continue teaching in isolation—without helping students see connections—I wonder if we also encourage ways of living in isolation. I don’t mean social isolation, but the compartmentalization of subjects that trains us to think in silos. This mindset can dull our sense of humanness, making it easier to dehumanize others or overlook our responsibilities to one another and the planet. Seeing connections between people, systems, and the environment requires more than knowledge—it requires curiosity, reflection, and care. Avoiding the social and ecological consequences of disconnection may leave students unprepared to recognize or respond to the crises they will inevitably face.
The Learning Gardens program shows what becomes possible when this relational worldview guides learning in practice, using food systems as a unifying concept. Williams describes how local food production connects community well-being, health, pride, and learning, while fostering a strong sense of ownership and belonging. Reading about families sharing cultural foods and creating gardens rooted in their traditions made me reflect on my own school garden, which often becomes overgrown or underused. I wonder what might change if gardens were treated as shared community spaces rather than isolated projects.
What possibilities do you envision if you had a school or classroom garden? What might gardens make possible that classrooms alone cannot?
I completely agree that connection is central, and I also resonate with your point about how much we’re trained to teach in isolation. It really does take intentional “relearning” to bring things back together and help students see relationships across subjects, systems, and experiences.
ReplyDeleteWhen I think about your question—what might a garden offer?—I immediately remembered a time when I taught in Midway. We had a space at a community garden where we went weekly, and one year we planted a number of plants. Many of them didn’t survive—the heat was intense, and they weren’t watered enough. On the surface, it might have seemed like failure, but it became a powerful learning experience. We could talk about what went wrong, what we could do differently, and why things didn’t work out. In the garden, failure was just a part of the process—it was okay for things to die.
The garden also opened opportunities to explore cycles, teamwork, and community support. Students could ask: how could we have helped each other more? How could we have reached out to the wider community? Those conversations, grounded in a real place, made learning relational, reflective, and deeply embodied.
When I think about the big core competencies we’re trying to teach—resiliency, teamwork, collaboration, planning—a garden seems like an ideal space for all of that. Everything in the garden is interconnected: growth depends on effort, observation, and care, and students experience first-hand how their choices affect outcomes. In a garden, connection isn’t just a concept—it’s lived, felt, and experienced.
Technocratic is a new word for me, and I not only had to look up the definition but also some examples of it around the world! Thank you for teaching me! I love the line, “the whole can only be understood through its parts.” It feels true in so many regards. When I teach a student both math and PHE, I know more of their parts and therefore feel like I know them exponentially better as a whole. Moreover, in the environment, when I understand what aspects help Ponderosa pines to thrive, their habitat, and their threats, I feel like I better understand the whole forest by seeing these “symptoms.”
ReplyDeleteDuring one of my practicums, I worked at Southern Canoe Outdoor School in Salmon Arm, and these opportunities to connect with nature were exactly as you describe. They were multidisciplinary, multisensory, intergenerational, and deeply connecting between people, land, and spirit. I also see these individualistic ways, and I am shocked but don’t disagree with your correlation of siloed subjects. My mom’s culture is deeply about helping thy neighbour and banding together, so I can see how impactful these values and actions can be. In math, often my highest-achieving students are the ones who can spot math anywhere, even in a dog leash being pulled by their human! These extra, interdisciplinary neuroconnections that arise seem to aid students’ confidence, problem-solving abilities, and sense-making during word problems.
To answer your question, this summer I actually got to act as a student in building a STEAM garden, and it was all with medicinal local Okanagan plants in relation to one of our local gardening centers. It was very enlightening as to how interdisciplinary it can be to both coordinate with people as well as bring different subjects together. I think gardens can make possible unique problem-solving scenarios that are almost organic; they can’t be made up. For example, when we were buying our plants, the truck came in with only plugs instead of buckets in a whole format of plants, so we had to change the plan and budget! I have photos of our garden at UBCO, but I can’t attach them in comments!