Grade 3, Mr. Broadhurst, and a Daffodil
Mr. Broadhurst was one of those teachers that we all hopefully have had. He was an inspirited Scottish exchange teacher that certainly spent much of his time finding new ways to teach and inspire. It was grade three and I was completely in love with going to school. This love wasn’t because I knew I was learning how to add and multiply so that when I grew up I could file my taxes in an orderly fashion. It also wasn’t because I really wanted to know that “a animal” should be “an animal” in my story exercises. It certainly wasn’t because our classroom was in the basement of a 100 year old brick school house next to the gurgling and groaning oil heating system that clanked at odd times, lending a rich timbre to our Hallowe’en party. This love of school was because Mr. Broadhurst revitalized our experience every single day that we showed up. His eyes twinkled and he led us on journeys beyond the damp brick walls. Field trips into our minds and field trips into the weird and wonderful school property. Though, now that I have gone back there it seems rather normal!
Before I keep not-so-eloquently waxing about my love for school, I have to get something off my chest about Mr. Broadhurst. It was my chair that was selected when Mr. Broadhurst asked if anyone had an old chair at home that he could borrow for the year’s reading corner. I was overjoyed at being specially chosen, and felt that my chair was evidence of being a responsible and giving person. Every time we would lay on the cushions in that corner to hear his Scottish brogue reading Roald Dahl, my body would quiver with delight. Even writing this now, I am getting some distant quivers. Oh, the glee of hearing about the countenance of The Twits’ faces. I was so enraptured:
A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely. (Dahl, 1998, p. 9)
Not that I am saying anything about Mr. Broadhurst’s teeth. They were very respectable. It was this sparkle of enthusiasm that engaged me every day. And when spring came along, he took us on an adventure. The adventure of growing a daffodil. We all piled out our basement door onto the concrete play area. This was the very same area that I learned about the birds and the bees from a grade five, scarred my knee forever, and played in the piles of Garry oak leaves. He had set up a miniature raised bed, right there on the concrete. I said, “You can’t grow flowers on concrete!!” and his response was, “Why not?” We then set about growing our daffodil bulbs in that raised bed for the rest of the spring. How cool was this? I was completely into doing this. Yet, the transformational experience that I had from growing that daffodil wasn’t anything to do with the fact that we were learning about bulbs versus other root types, or that daffodils are among the first flowers to bloom in Victoria BC, or that their latin name was Narcissus like that self-obsessed Greek God. It was the magic of planting, watching, leaving, returning, and witnessing this plant grow under my own care. That daffodil spring-boarded my interest in plants, and subsequently influenced me to explore botany in my undergraduate degree such that I practiced as a canopy epiphytologist for six years, climbing some of the tallest trees in the world.
Transformational ecology of mind
This experience was more than simple gardening of a daffodil. This experience transformed my outlook on life. I saw the world in a different way, through different eyes now that I was the father of a daffodil. That cliché of “planting seeds in young minds,” I think only works if you support that seed in its growth, and recognize that it is part of an ecology of mind and place that occurs within a cosmos of connecting ideas. Bateson’s (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind, frames this concept from an anthro-ecological lens (that is, a lens in which humans and ecology are considered completely inter-related):
The questions which this book raises are ecological: How do ideas interact? Is there some sort of natural selection which determines the survival of ideas and the extinction or death of others? What sort of economics limits the multiplicity of ideas in a given region of the mind? What are the necessary conditions for stability (or survival) of such a system or subsystem? (Bateson, 1972, p. xxiii)
Why did the daffodil experience find comfortable habitat in my brain, so that I would refer back to it years later in this reflexive act? I believe that this experience was completely transformational for my life direction. These transformational moments of knowing one’s direction are beyond curricular design. They exist almost in happenstance. We know, as teachers, that we can build great opportunities, and then hope for the best. Sometimes curriculum works and sometimes it doesn’t. It seems to depend on such a complex system of factors like students, weather, food, teaching space, time, among a large list of factors not apparent to me. Part of the experience of building a curriculum and then enacting it gets snared inside of ego and expectations. Perhaps we need to see that the curriculum is also part of the ecological system. That being facilitators of experiences and place is only part of our role. The other part of our role is as participants. We help generate ideas within the complex ecology of thoughts and also react to ideas and thoughts with our own experiences.
Extending the notion that gardening (especially permaculture) is the conservation of ecology, where humans tend systems for their own benefit (and sometimes the benefit of the systems around them), we could say that Minds are like gardens. They are where we plant seeds, add nutrients, water, soil and within that matrix, a complex system of interacting thoughts develop. Imagine now that all of our minds form a system of interacting sub-systems or mind-gardens and that this system is vital to our own existence through its integrity, complexity, redundancy, and resilience. This system of thought (or Ecology of Mind) suggests that we need to spend time tending each other’s gardens by sharing, supporting, and experiencing alternative ways of knowing as best we can. Perhaps then, we can move even beyond what we know of as “transdisciplinarity” to a place of sacred disciplinarity, where mindfulness, empathy, and compassion play integral roles in our conversations. Sometimes sacredness comes in the simplest moments, like when we take time to watch the plants grow.
Pedagogy Questions: The evidence that gardens can be used in transformative curriculum is strong. However, a few questions remain for me. I invite you to help me trouble them further by clicking here.
- Beyond the transdisciplinarity of garden curricula, what are we learning about ourselves when we create gardens in schools?
- Are there ways to achieve transformational experiences, similar to what gardens offer, through a curriculum without a garden or even a place?
- How might we further extend the analogy of gardening to our minds? How does spirituality, morality, and science fit into this notion?