School gardening activities as contextual scaffolding for learning science: participatory action research in a community school in Nepal

ABSTRACT

Literature on school education suggests that teaching and learning science in basic level community schools in Nepal is largely theoretical. Consequently, achievement levels and the understanding of concepts of science is much below policy expectations. This paper builds on a shift from dogmatic lecturing to activity-based pedagogy using school gardening as contextual scaffolding for learning science in community schools in central Nepal. Five focus group discussions and observations were carried out among sixth and seventh graders, science teachers, and parents of an action (intervention) school located in the Chitwan district of Nepal, with support from the NORHED/Rupantaran project. At the beginning of the PAR project, the barriers associated with startup gardening activities were time allocation, integration of gardening activities with the science curriculum, and the ongoing engagement of parents. Later in the project, students, science teachers, and parents reported on their experiences such as active and meaningful engagement in activity-based pedagogy through school gardening. Overall, school gardening activities were found to have positive effects on students’ understanding of scientific concepts, connecting school gardens in a contextual scaffold.

KEYWORDS:

• Activity-based instruction
• community knowledge
• contextual scaffold
• gardening activities

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the science teachers, parents, and students who engaged meaningfully in the school gardening activities as a part of science learning. This paper has been prepared with support from the NORHED/Rupantaran project entitled ‘Innovations in Teaching and Learning through Contextualized Approaches to Increase the Quality, Relevance and Sustainability of Education in Nepal’ which has been jointly implemented in Nepal by Tribhuvan University (TU), Kathmandu University (KU), and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). The authors are grateful to the project coordinators for their valuable support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Ethical statement

This research was conducted according to the guidelines laid down in the Declaration of Nepal Health Research Council (NHRC) and the Nepal Government and all procedures involving human subjects were approved by the Ethics Committee of the NHRC. Consents were obtained from all the research participants.

Authors’ contributions

KPA collected, transcribed, translated and interpreted the data, and drafted the manuscript. CBB, BB, and BD provide scholarly guidance and corrected the manuscript. All the authors read and approved the final version of the manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded in part through a NORAD project (2016-2021), agreement number [2016Q2A04].