Words matter: Outdoor learning, nutrition, and physical activity

Folks:

I know many of you only a little, but you might be interested in some of the other work I'm doing in town. It has a lot to do with messaging and starting where people are. It also informs some of my perspectives in ways I didn't expect.

Here is an article that ran in the WSJ in September:
Madison students get down and dirty for the sake of education - and eating

And here is our Coalition's web site:

The Madison Area GROW Coalition (Grass Roots | Outdoor Wonder)

Most of our members are parents and teachers, and we also have members representing a diverse range of outdoor education and youth development groups in the area. Sustain Dane is our fiscal agent, and I partner with Rachel Martin, who directs their partnership with MMSD. (Rachel and I both started elementary school gardens in town, hers at Midvale and ours at Van Hise.)

To avoid the "eat your spinach" message, we avoid talking with parents, teachers and kids about "nutrition and physical activity," and obesity prevention never comes up in our conversations. Still, these outcomes are central to our mission. Of course, we talk about them when we seek funding, in our steering group meetings, and when we talk about evaluation. But day to day, we know that if you open up the space, create opportunity, use community-building approaches, and rely on evidence-based curricula for outdoor learning, behavioral changes will follow.

We also know that through garden-based learning, kids become more engaged in their learning (and they actually like it that way). When kids talk about outdoor learning with parents, parents notice, and teachers are reinforced to learn more and take the kids outside. When you approach a teacher or a principal who has never gardened--or someone who is even gardening-phobic--you talk instead about youth development in garden-based learning. They perk up and pay attention.

Ultimately, our coalition's target for policy change is to make it imperative for MMSD to incorporate sustainability education into the infrastructure and curricula in our schools. Our lessons are organic, so to speak, and our mission now is to capture them.

What I didn't expect is how much our efforts have paved the way for others to take action. Parents and teachers connect the dots. A friend in our neighborhood said to me one day, after the garden was installed, "If you can do this, I can run the walking school bus!" Now we have more than 60 neighborhood kids walking in groups to and from school each day. Another parent, who I didn't know as well, came up to me after school, saying, "We are starting Indian cooking classes for parents and teachers. We'll raise funds for the school. I wouldn't have done it unless I had seen what you've been able to do." A teacher walked up to me at the end of the school year last year and said, "You have to know that whenever a student has a tough time focusing, we take him out to the garden to do a job or two, and it changes his day. It's simply magical."

That's community-building, as far as I can tell.

If you're interested in joining us, let me know! It's a great crowd of people, and there are always volunteer opportunities to get dirty with kids.