By Harriet Sanford
President & CEO
The NEA Foundation
Photo courtesy of Active Citizen Project/Project EATs
Happy Earth Day! In our latest Huffington Post Blog, we explore how students getting their hands in the earth goes way beyond STEM education.
“The greenhouse at Fernwood Montessori, a public school in Milwaukee, doesn’t just contain a sustainable ecosystem for the plants and fish inside. An innovation in teaching, this cutting-edge aquaponics program teaches students about healthy eating and entrepreneurship, it’s at the heart of a sustainable future for Fernwood’s students and their neighborhood.
In schools in Milwaukee and New York City, we’re seeing that when students get their hands dirty with urban farming, they wind up learning about all kinds of things—healthy foods and lifestyles, entrepreneurship, and the needs of their communities. At the same time, they are doing real science, building and monitoring complex aquaponics systems, farming on school grounds, maintaining compost piles, and selling the fruits of their labor to local restaurants and at farm stands in their neighborhoods. It’s a textbook example of how to engage kids in science, technology, math, and engineering—but the problem is that experiential learning activities of this sort are rarely found in textbooks. …”
Continue reading the blog, “In the Weeds: Why urban farming helps students work across disciplines and solve our biggest STEM dilemma,” on the Huffington Post.
