Teachers’ Views about School Garden Program Developed for Free Activities Course

Abstract

The School Garden Program (SGP) is a garden-based learning project which has students create their own designs, is performed in schoolyards and involves planned and organized gardening activities that grow a variety of plants. The SGP was created by the author. It is an 18-week semi-flexible interdisciplinary program with class and non-class activities. The program’s class activities were performed in a certain framework, while the non-class activities were flexible. The objective of this study is to evaluate the applicability of SGP, which was realized in the context of the Free Activities Course (FAC), based on teachers' opinions. This is a case study. The sample of the study included two classroom teachers who used SGP in scope of FAC as well as two mathematics teachers, two science teachers and two social studies teachers who used it in their lessons in the 2014 spring semester. The author held interviews with these teachers and observed their implementations of SGP. The data from the interviews and observations were analyzed using content analysis. At the end of the study, the participating teachers concluded that SGP was a suitable program for FAC, and that it was an interdisciplinary and alternative learning environment for the course, scientific practice, in the middle school curriculum