Connecting Children to Place, Community and Nature through Education

Meet Wanda Stewart, a visionary educator who has effectively weaved nature and community into children’s education. Her place-based education approach has engaged and inspired students from all backgrounds. Wanda shows us how the education system needs to change to better support the well-being of our children and planet. This post is the final one of Profiles in Living Connected to Place, my series that portrays individuals living connected to place with intention and the support of systems that make it possible. Prior posts can be found here.

Wanda Stewart has fond memories of childhood hiking and spending time by the river in a park near her home in Philadelphia.

Years later, she became the Director of Admissions at a boarding school in Sedona, Arizona. There, she reconnected to the land and grew food for the first time. Wanda learned about homesteading from friends at the school who roasted coffee, picked apples, and made juice and medicine.  

Working at another boarding school in Los Olivos, California, she became accustomed to fresh eggs and produce from the school’s twelve-acre organic garden. Students were responsible for almost everything they needed daily, including chopping wood to heat water.

Wanda moved to Berkeley, California, after her time working and living at boarding schools. She started an edible garden on her property and pursued a master gardening and permaculture certificate. Wanda worked in public school administration and ran a cooperative grocery store, but she wanted her passion for gardening and growing food to be central to her professional life.

When she was hired to run and teach in a school garden at Hoover Elementary in West Oakland, Wanda found just what she needed. Most children at the school were growing up in poverty. The school was in a food desert and had the lowest test scores in the school district.

At Hoover, Wanda helped transform 10,000 square feet on the campus into a place for students to grow culturally relevant food. As a result of their stewardship, the garden overflowed with fruits and vegetables that were jumping the fence. They grew collard greens and chayote and learned that mixing them created a delicious dish. If a fight was brewing on campus, Wanda reminded the children that they “all need to get along like collard greens and chayote.” As the school community embraced the garden, it became known as the Hoover Hawks Victory Garden.

Over time, Wanda noticed many changes in the children. She shared that “their awareness of what to eat, how to nourish their bodies, and themselves as part of an ecosystem skyrocketed.” Students learned firsthand about life cycles and ecosystems from caterpillars and butterflies and a hawk helping with rodent control. Initially, kids grabbed the caterpillars. Once they understood the stages that transform a caterpillar into a butterfly, they stopped picking them up and became respectful observers.

Wanda has many stories of students being transformed by their experiences in the garden. She told me about one student who had dealt with significant hardship:

Ty [pseudonym] was brilliant but had ADHD. His dad was in jail for killing his mom. His grandmom had alcohol on her breath by 10 a.m. He would often flee class or school. With newly hatched baby chicks one week, the children played a game of trying to hold them gently and getting them to fall asleep. Ty was holding one and asked me, ‘How long have I been doing this?’ And I responded, ’30 minutes.’ He said, ‘This is the longest time I’ve done anything in my life.’ This changed who he was in the classroom.

These experiences affirmed her belief in the school garden as a “place to educate, transform, and heal.”

In her three years at Hoover Elementary, test scores rose significantly. Multiple factors accounted for the rise, including the opportunities for children to work together on garden projects. Students learned teamwork and applied that to being quiet during tests and not bothering other students.

Wanda is now the Executive Director of Common Vision, a nonprofit organization that plants fruit tree orchards in low-income schools and supports schools in starting gardens. Common Vision runs a tree corps of older youth that plants and maintains the trees, among other programs.

Wanda won a Jefferson Award from the local CBS station affiliate for exemplary service to communities. She was recognized for nourishing community through food, gardening, and education.

Wanda remains connected to the Hoover garden and school community. During the COVID-19 school closures, the community cared for the garden and harvested “collard greens, melons, plantains, and oregano and other herbs that help with respiration.” A group of teachers who had been initially resistant to the garden taught remote lessons from it to their students at home.

The Hoover community has experienced firsthand the power of place-based education.

The well-being and learning of students can greatly improve through experiences outside classroom walls in which students connect to nature and community. Imagine if our education system was oriented more around place than standardized curriculum and testing. Let’s work toward it.