Exit Slip: Reflections on UBC Orchard Garden experiences


Today we visited the UBC Orchard Garden and my experience, as a prospective teacher was one much different than I have had before. This time around, I took in the garden as a place of learning. It was a place where I could engage my senses and gain a sense of wonder for the space I was in. Susan did an excellent job of allowing us to show our wonder via the drawing activity we did. We were asked to draw man-made and natural things we saw but I found myself spending all 30 minutes drawing a pumpkin and a bit of its background. One thing I learned from this activity was that when drawing man-made objects there is often a start, and a stop. Contrastingly when I was drawing this pumpkin I saw the stem attached to another plant and the plant attached to the ground and the ground holding other pumpkins and insects on the leaves and on and on and on…What I took away from this is that natural objects are continuous, and are all interconnected. This struck a bell for teaching in my head whereby humans and their learning has all come from their environment and so we are also interconnected to nature. This is an aspect that cannot be realized from simply learning in the classroom. This is why I enjoyed the UBC Orchard Garden so much.

Comments

  1. Susan Gerofsky5 January 2018 at 13:40

    Thanks for the deep and thoughtful comments, Amadeus! I had never thought about drawing as a way to really experience the interconnectedness of all things in the natural world...and interestingly, I experienced this too as we were drawing in the Garden in October!

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