How Does Your Garden Grow? Or, a Poststructural Uprooting of the School Garden

A school garden is an organic emergence. A dehiscence opened as the collaborative play of the natural world and human interaction with the earth, the garden provides a motif for the opening and exploration of research and the research space. Like the garden, research and the research space is full of life, of actions, of inter-actions, of play, growing beyond, beneath, and over the boundaries and structures already in place. With deconstruction and diffĂŠrance in mind, this dissertation meditates on the school garden as both content and context for learning as well as its opening of spaces for difference in curriculum, pedagogy, research, and representation. The research space opened traces the experience of an urban elementary school garden and presents the story of a year spent with and in the City Public School community. Along with day-to-day reflections, it shares the space of research opened by a school garden-related participatory research project done with a group of grade six students in which the young researchers were actively involved in all aspects of the research, from creating research questions to collecting and analyzing data to dissemination of findings. The work highlights the unique uprooting and upsetting of taken-for-granted binaries in curriculum, education, and research.In the re-presentation of the research and the research space, I play with/in Jacques Derrida's discussion and use of the postcard. Envois - sendings, parcels, letters, dispatches - are used to share the research narrative which, illuminated through a deconstructive reading, is always already situated within philosophical, historical, methodological, cultural, social, institutional, ethical, and personal contexts. The dissertation plays as well with the linear flow of the thesis, necessarily forgoing the traditional architecture of academic representation in favour of an open text of multiplicity and difference, one of columns, insertions, marginalia, images, and quotations that is at once separate and connected, and inherently at play.Ph.D.2016-06-16 00:00:0