“We never even touched plants this way”: school gardens as an embodied context for motivating environmental actions
Sensory and embodied interactions with plants may help children learn, act, care, and live in ways that encourage ecological flourishing
Many environmental education programs leverage information to try to change people’s minds about environmental issues. However, this cognitive bias within environmental education downplays how the emotions and body-based interactions with nature may motivate people’s action and shift their environmental perspectives. This case study examined how one school’s food garden motivated youth to care for and about the natural world through direct sensory experience and affective encounters with plants. The goal was to foreground kids’ close and embodied interactions with the natural environment so that environmental educators might nurture sensory and emotional learning environments that may be conducive to children learning, acting, caring, and living in ways that encourage ecological flourishing.
This qualitative study examined the case of a food garden on a school rooftop in a densely populated suburb of Mundai, India. The project spanned ten months with 40 children age 11-13 participating in a Saturday school gardening program. The first author designed the program around open-ended farming and composting activities which supported direct sensory engagements with plants and social interactions with other participants. Mixing traditional qualitative analysis with participant-observation research, the study documented kids’ body-based interactions with plants and garden artifacts using observation notes, photos, and videos and supplemented them with interviews and artifact analysis. Data analysis documented the sensory interactions, emotional references, motivational triggers, and broader perspectives observed in the garden. It also traced the extent to which participants engaged in similar garden-based activities away from the site, such as composting, mulching, growing plants, etc.
Data analysis showed how the project’s farm-based embodied learning design supported sensory and embodied engagements with nature which helped children understand natural processes, shift their environmental perspectives, and continue garden-based activities beyond the school garden site. Participants’ sensory engagements—seeing, touching, smelling, and tasting plants—helped them understand natural process and prompted them to engage in more plant-based activities away from the program. Participant-plant connections which induced awe or enchantment were linked to more empathy for plants and farmers and to increased generosity toward the more-than-human world. Children demonstrated and explicitly noted how the program’s open-ended design supported social processes which fostered personal responsibility and norms of collaboration and sharing that they did not associate with the social processes of typical school-based learning. Of the 40 participants, 36 also reported that they engaged in plant-based activities away from the school garden site after the program. In many cases, these nature-based activities were intergenerational—with children teaching their parents about gardening or joining their grandparents in garden-based activities.
In this case, sensory learning played a key role in participants’ environmental learning. Students also reported residential activities with plants in which their parents or grandparents were co-participants. Based on these related findings, the authors suggest that multi-modal sensory experiences—and the possibility and sharing these with other individuals—motivate children to expand their sphere of activities into neighboring action spaces. In addition, opportunities for participants to subvert conventional knowledge transfer—from teacher to student or parent to child—also motivated youth to learn more about the natural world, share that knowledge, and participate in nature-based activities away from the school garden program. In particular, open-ended farming activities and intergenerational plant-based activities stood out as powerful learning experiences for these participants. Likewise, shared activities allowed for social bonding, which, in turn, motivated participation in more shared nature activities which strengthened and shifted people’s connections to nature. Finally, the authors note that intergenerational activities may be especially powerful in so-called developing countries because many elders in urban environments have past agricultural knowledge that may be tapped in joint activities with young people which potentially can shift the younger generations’ orientations to plants, food, and the environment. This specific case has the potential to help other environmental educators nurture sensory and emotional learning environments that may be conducive to children learning different ways of knowing and being with the natural world.
Citation
Dutta, D., Chandrasekharan, S., (2025). “We never even touched plants this way”: school gardens as an embodied context for motivating environmental actions. Environmental Education Research, 31(2),
