“As Soon As They Realized That the Kale Was Ready to Eat It Was Gone”: Gardening and Young Children’s Self-Guided Learning and Environmental Engagement

Nicole Yantzi (School of the Environment, Laurentian University)

There is agreement in the literature about the importance of engaging children in environmental inquiry at an earlier age. This presentation uses multiple points of data from a pilot study at an early childcare center to show that gardening is an effective way to use play-based, self-guided learning to stimulate children’s natural curiosity and engagement. Laurentian University researchers and the Laurentian Child and Family Center (LCFC) in Sudbury Ontario, Canada collaborated on a research project from May to September 2017. Two focus groups were conducted with childhood educators (n=5) and two were conducted with school-aged children (n=5 and n=4). Twenty-five participant observation sessions were conducted with school-aged children and 21 sessions were conducted with pre-school children. This rich source of data includes observation notes, pictures, journals and artwork at the time the children interacted with the garden, and research assistant debriefing notes after each session.

The importance of the key theme of taste testing, which the children named, is central in this presentation. Numerous times the children would eat vegetables such as kale, ripe and unripe cherry tomatoes and beans right off the plants. The educators were surprised as the children frequently refused these same vegetables when prepared in the center’s kitchen for lunches and snacks. Yet, these same vegetables were often devoured by the children right off the plant, raw, with no sauces. Taste testing helped to promote children’s self-guided learning through investigative and social skills, ability to make connections between the garden and other environments such as the children’s homes, and understanding of environmental relationships and processes.