The Digital Garden at Santa Fe College
The Digital Culture Garden at Santa Fe integrates an organic food garden with an online campus learning environment that emphasizes the social, cultural, economic and environmental significance of common edible plants. Centrally located within a community college campus that hosts a primarily low-income and minority student body, a non-GMO organic garden will showcase edible plants with informational placards that display a QR code that links student smartphones to plant-specific webpages. Each student-produced webpage will provide multi-media (text, videos, images, ADA accessible audio, etc) and digital educational materials that highlight the social, economic, cultural, and enviromental importance of the plant as well as youth-friendly recipes. Food generated by the garden will available to campus environmental groups and cultural associations to use during open campus events targetting cultural diversity and/or sustainability.
This food-orientated educational project aims to highlight the social and cultural components of food sustainability within a campus population that is primarily comprised of students from marginalized populations. It will provide opportunities for faculty to integrate gardening activities into their coursework, and students will be able to engage in experiential gardening activities outside of the classroom as well as collaborative research with faculty to produce informative webpages about edible plants. The garden will also provide a social locus to integrate a diversified student population through the shared experience of food and culture. Previous research has shown that gardening encourages connections between different social groups by promoting moments of shared experiences in learning and working together (http://www.internationale-gaerten.de/). The Digital Culture Garden at Santa Fe College will highlight global and cultural diversity on campus and throughout the broader community through the prominent role of food production and food-sharing among a diversified group of students and faculty.
KGI is a nonprofit community of over 30,000 people who are growing some of our own food and helping others to do the same.
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