Opening a Space of/for Curriculum: The Learning Garden as Context and Content for Difference in Mathematics Education

Abstract

The late Ted Aoki playfully identified curriculum as a “weasel word,” one that eludes definition, its slipperiness not allowing for it to be pinned down to any one universal meaning (Aoki, 1993). Instead, curriculum is inclusive of all learning contents and contexts; it extends and interacts rhizomatically and without boundaries. The curricular space, that rich space for learning and of learning, is similarly unbounded and endlessly open and interactive. This openness pushes beyond the four walls of the classroom, disrupting and dismantling the very structure of modern understandings of a curriculum that is framed by disciplines and disciplinary spaces. The learning garden grows a space, a space beyond, for such multidisciplinary curricular possibilities. As both content and context, the garden allows for difference to be recognized and realized in the planned and lived curriculum of learners of all ages, and this is particularly true for early years and elementary school students. This paper weaves together the multiple yet inextricably linked garden-based curricular moments of early years and elementary mathematics learning in the garden. Drawing on a participatory research study with elementary school students on their experience of their urban school garden and through shared curricular vignettes , it traces children’s organic and situated explorations of number sense and numeration, measurement, geometry and spatial sense, patterns and algebra, and data management and probability in the garden, opening up a space and a place for digging into mathematics concepts and processes and into curriculum itself.