Lexi Earl – författare

This book delves into the complex history of the gardening movement in schools and examines the question why gardens should be built in schools. It offers practical guidance for teachers to begin thinking about how to approach educational gardening.

A resurgence of interest in school gardens is linked to concerns about children’s health, food knowledge, lack of outdoor play and contact with the natural world. This book warns against simplistic one-best approaches and makes a case about the complexity of gardening in schools. It is the first critical attempt to address the complex and conflicting notions about school gardens and to tackle the question ‘what is the problem to which school gardens are the answer?’ Examining the educational theory in which gardening has been explained and advocated, the book explores the way contemporary gardens research has been conducted with specific questions such as ‘what works well in school gardens?’ Based on case studies of a school establishing a garden and another one maintaining a garden, chapters look at the way in which schools come to frame their gardens. The authors suggest that there are four issues to consider when setting up a school garden or evaluating a pre-existing one – wider social context, public policy, the whole school, and the formal and informal curriculum.

The book ends with a call for consideration of the ways in which school gardens can be built, the myriad practices that constitute an educational garden space and the challenges of maintaining a school garden over the long term. It will be of interest to teachers in primary schools, as well as a key point of reference for scholars, academics and students researching school gardens.

This book delves into the complex history of the gardening movement in schools and examines the question why gardens should be built in schools. It offers practical guidance for teachers to begin thinking about how to approach educational gardening.

A resurgence of interest in school gardens is linked to concerns about children’s health, food knowledge, lack of outdoor play and contact with the natural world. This book warns against simplistic one-best approaches and makes a case about the complexity of gardening in schools. It is the first critical attempt to address the complex and conflicting notions about school gardens and to tackle the question ‘what is the problem to which school gardens are the answer?’ Examining the educational theory in which gardening has been explained and advocated, the book explores the way contemporary gardens research has been conducted with specific questions such as ‘what works well in school gardens?’ Based on case studies of a school establishing a garden and another one maintaining a garden, chapters look at the way in which schools come to frame their gardens. The authors suggest that there are four issues to consider when setting up a school garden or evaluating a pre-existing one – wider social context, public policy, the whole school, and the formal and informal curriculum.

The book ends with a call for consideration of the ways in which school gardens can be built, the myriad practices that constitute an educational garden space and the challenges of maintaining a school garden over the long term. It will be of interest to teachers in primary schools, as well as a key point of reference for scholars, academics and students researching school gardens.

Schools and Food Education in the 21st Century examines how schools enact food policy, and through doing so, craft diverse foodscapes that create very different food experiences in schools. The school food policy discourse is made up of an amalgamation of discourses on obesity prevention, nutrition education, welfarism and foodieness. Whilst schools endeavor to enact policy in a variety of ways, this book shows how foodieness is taken up, and can only be taken up differently, in different schools.

The book’s unique contribution is to identify the discourse of foodieness and to show how this discourse, whilst seemingly universal, is actually situated in middle-class ideas and is therefore more easily taken up by certain schools. The book argues that the classed nature of foodieness leads to certain food knowledges becoming marginalized or lost and this then positions some schools in tension with their local communities, resulting in widely variant food experiences for children. Earl demonstrates how foodieness is taken up in schools by first exploring how the foodscape at school is shaped by policy and media sources. The book then examines how foodieness is taken up by schools with different SES profiles by showing how food moves through the school day.

Asking critical questions on class and poverty that are often overlooked, this book will be of interest to researchers, academics and students working on food issues related to teaching, food, policy and schools in the fields of education, sociology and food studies. It should also be of interest to policymakers, parents and teachers.