Michael A. Szolowicz

“Who’s Gonna Water My Tomatoes?”: School Gardens, Kitchens, and the Search for Educational Authenticity updates an old concept for our modern age, utilizing school gardens and culinary kitchens where students grow, prepare, and eat their own food.

Over a century ago, the educational philosopher John Dewey proposed reforming education around the needs of the whole child, emphasizing academic learning and the child's social needs for effective participation in a democratic society. In Dewey’s view, children would best learn by engaging in authentic experiences that would introduce, complement, and complete their regular classroom experiences. Dewey talked about school gardens and kitchens as two specific laboratories where children could apply what they were learning in school in daily life. Today, the tensions between experiential learning and the more rote learning often found in regular classrooms remain. Educators increasingly find themselves accountable to the narrow performance pressures imposed by standardized testing, pressures that often squeeze out the joys and possibilities for more authentic and engaging learning found in real-world experiences.

This book explores Dewey’s philosophy with particular attention given to experiential learning’s relationship to gardens and kitchens. The school garden and kitchen movement itself has ebbed and flowed over the last hundred years in response to changing societal and educational pressures. This history leads to the present day, where the edible schoolyard movement is experiencing a new spring as educators, parents, and school communities find value in edible schoolyard’s possibilities for providing more wholistic education that better meets the academic, social, and emotional needs of students. The book focuses on a network of edible schoolyards by introducing educators, teachers, principals, and staff who are making edible schoolyards happen today. Their vision and motivations form in their favorite lessons and in the connections between garden and kitchen experiences to the more traditional subject matter favored on state tests. Suggestions and resources for starting new edible schoolyards, including suggested recipes, are provided for those who want to get growing with their own edible schoolyards.

Perfect for courses such as: Educational Reform; Educational History; Educational Philosophy; Educational Leadership; Curriculum Development and Transformation; Experiential Learning; Project Based Learning; and Educational Policy Environments