Food Works
Joseph Kiefer, director
64 Main St.
Montpelier, Vt. 05602
(802) 223-1515

Joe Kiefer, a tall, lean and fast-talking New Yorker who moved from the city to a dairy farm near Albany as a youngster during the '50s and went on to get a master's degree in social ecology and become one of Vermont's leading hunger fighters (he was a key organizer and past president of the Vermont Food Bank), has a new idea that he thinks will take the nation beyond the need for food banks.

The audacious idea behind Food Works is simple but bold: Kiefer would restructure the nation's approach to elementary education, changing it from a piecemeal survey of separate studies to a unified, holistic curriculum centered on food policy and hunger through hands-on gardening.

Absurd? Even if it seems so at first, an hour listening to Kiefer might make you think such a thing could be.

In Kiefer's dream, which has been tested at the Rumney School in Middlesex, Vt., and now at the Barnet School in St. Johnsbury, gardening becomes the nucleus around which math, English, science, nutrition, history and other subjects are taught.

In a very quick overview, his proposed elementary school curriculum would follow the traditional educational principle of "going from near to far," focusing on the child's home and family in the early grades, then extending their reach to their neighborhood, their community, the nation and the world as they move through the grades.

Thus. the general principle used at the Rumney School featured a separate, and increasingly complex, garden for each grade, from a simple "child's garden"for the kindergarteners to Native American plants in first and second-grade, historical New England gardens for third and fourth-graders, and a look at sustainable agriculture for the fifth and sixth-graders.

All elementary-level courses would be tied in with the gardens. For example, mathematics would involve counting seeds, weighing produce, measuring volume and area, and rising to business mathematics. Social studies would focus on the history of agricultural communities, historic tools and techniques used to grow and preserve food, farm-to-market economics and so on. Language arts would feature journals, garden lore, legends, story telling, fiction and local history books. Science would examine garden ecology, botany, agronomy, ornithology, ecology and much more. The entire curriculum, however, would meet all state and local curriculum requirements.

The underlying principle, Kiefer said, is summed up in the old Chinese mantra: "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." Using gardening as the central focus of education, children do, they don't merely sit in class as receptacles for irrelevant information.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

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