Source: THE HOUSE TUSCALOOSA submitted to
KNOW : GROW : SHOW COMMUNITY GARDEN SERVICE-LEARNING PROGRAM
Sponsoring Institution
National Institute of Food and Agriculture
Project Status
ACTIVE
Funding Source
OTHER GRANTS
Reporting Frequency
Annual
Accession No.
1030986
Grant No.
2023-70448-40417
Cumulative Award Amt.
$225,000.00
Proposal No.
2023-02001
Multistate No.
(N/A)
Project Start Date
Sep 1, 2023
Project End Date
Aug 31, 2026
Grant Year
2023
Program Code
[FASLP]- Food and Agriculture Service Learning Program
Project Director
Maxey, L.
Recipient Organization
THE HOUSE TUSCALOOSA
2924 FIRETHORN DRIVE
TUSCALOOSA,AL 35405
Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
The Know : Grow : Show Community Garden Service-Learning Program helps students acquire knowledge of gardening, improve nutritional health and develop into engaged citizens serving their community. The program is run by The House Tuscaloosa, a non-profit Literacy Center sitting on Stillman College's campus, in the middle of The West End Community of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Students who live in The West End come from households where the median income hovers around $25,000 and 37% percent of them fall at or below the poverty rate. While families struggle to survive, they are rarely able to make nutrition or civic engagement a high priority.Multiple organizations and schools within The West End Community were involved in planning and are engaged in project implementation. The program engages students during weekly after-school programming, with a new group participating every semester. During the program, students will KNOW about nutritional health and food insecurity, GROW food in the community garden, and SHOW what they learn through a capstone project and community distribution of food grown.The goals of the Know : Grow : Show Community Garden Service-Learning Program are as follows:1. To acquire knowledge of gardening2. To improve nutritional health of students3. To develop leaders engaged and serving in their community4. To increase practical application of math and reading skills5. To develop effective communication skillsThe goals and intended outcomes will primarily be achieved through development and delivery of a 12-15 week curriculum. Local stakeholders will work together to write the curriculum. Students from West End schools will be transported from their after-school programs once each week to The House Tuscaloosa and The Stillman Foundation Community Garden to participate in the activities scheduled for that day. While the curriculum is yet to be developed in detail, a broad outline of the curriculum is provided here.KNOWReading:Participating students read grade-level appropriate, high-interest fiction and non-fiction books selected by their librarians. Books are all directly related to the aims of the grant.Learning:Students participate in direct, in-person learning activities as designed by the curriculum-writing team, including (but not limited to) prepared presentations, expert demonstrations, and group discussions.Visiting:Students visit Loaves & Fishes, a local client-choice food pantry to learn about existing projects and agencies working to address food insecurity.GROWPlanning:Students plan their garden through guided crop design and placement.Preparing:Students prepare the land for their garden by prepping the soil under theguidance of an expert instructor.Planting:Students plant each seed and/or seedling according to their garden plan.Cultivating:Student cultivate their garden through tasks including (but not limited to)weeding, watering, and fertilization activities.Harvesting:Students work together to harvest each item grown in their garden.SHOWPreparing:Students participate in cooking what they have grown and taste/eat the products of their labor.Giving:Each cohort of students works collectively to donate all remaining produce from their garden to individuals and families in their community.Presenting:Each student documents their learning and experiences throughout the program and creates a "capstone project" in the form of a book. Students will also produce a Public Service Announcement designed to convey their learning about nutritional heath and service learning to their peers and community.The three pillars of the program are explicitly designed to increase critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork and effective communication. Students also learn about and participate in advocacy related to root causes of food insecurity. By embedding practice of these essential skills in the context of gardening, Know: Grow: Show provides "real-world" opportunities for service-learning.
Animal Health Component
(N/A)
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
(N/A)
Developmental
(N/A)
Classification

Knowledge Area (KA)Subject of Investigation (SOI)Field of Science (FOS)Percent
70360993020100%
Knowledge Area
703 - Nutrition Education and Behavior;

Subject Of Investigation
6099 - People and communities, general/other;

Field Of Science
3020 - Education;
Goals / Objectives
Goal 1: To acquire knowledge of gardeningObjective 1.1:Students will participate in after-school learning activities about gardening.Objective 1.2:Students will participate in hands-on work in the community garden for an entire growing season.Objective 1.3:Students will demonstrate general knowledge of basic gardening practices as demonstrated by their SHOW projects.Goal 2: To improve nutritional health of studentsObjective 2.1:Students will learn about the importance of including fruits and vegetables in their daily diet.Objective2.2:Students will participate in taste-testing of healthy foods.Objective 2.3:Students will demonstrate an expanded understanding of healthy nutritional choices and will model healthy decision-making within the context of nutritional choices available to them.Goal 3: To develop leaders engaged and serving in their communitiesObjective 3.1:Students will actively engage in studying nutritional choices available in their community.Objective 3.2:Students will participate in activities to address food insecurity and nutritional health in their community.Objective 3.3:Students will share what they learn by placing published capstone project books within community businesses such as doctors' office, laundromats, and barbershops.Goal 4: To increase practical application of reading and writing skillsObjective 4.1:Students will read books about gardening and nutritional health.Objective 4.2:Students will write books detailing what they learn about gardening and nutritional health.Goal 5: To develop effective communication skillsObjective 5.1:Students will encourage others to take advantage of service and volunteer opportunities within the Community Garden using developed Public Service Announcements.
Project Methods
EFFORTSDirect, in-person learning activities including (but not limited to) reading books, prepared presentations, expert demonstrations, and group discussionsHands-on gardening activitiesFood preparation and tastingsVisit to local food pantryCapstone book writing projectDevelopment of Public Service AnnouncementsEVALUATIONProjectKnow: Grow : Show (KGS)services reflect current informationfrom strong evidence-basedresearch and effective practice (evidence in previous sections) to improve relevant outcomes. To determine the appropriate services for our endeavor, staff in conjunction with community groups, conducted an extensive research and literature evaluation of best practices for improving academic achievement, and culturally relevant curriculum strategies through community gardening in schools with needs like our targeted schools. THT has anon-going needs assessmentof the community by soliciting input from students, parents, educators, and community-based partners. Disaggregation of the needs assessment, stakeholder input and the research and literature review ledKGSstaff to adopt a community garden framework for delivering services with supporting strategies that reflect best practices for improving academic and nutrition outcomes of our students. Wells in 2014 stated in his research, "Positive effects (e.g., better mental and emotional well-being as well as increased healthy eating habits) from increased time spent in nature have been extensively noted for adults and kids." Greenleaf, Bryant and Pollock in 2014, went on to state, "In addition to a Community Garden's nutritional implications, they also offer a unique benefit to psychosocial wellbeing. A person's interaction with the natural environment has notable positive health benefits."Our focus was to identify activities that targeted the most promising collaborative cross-disciplinary methods through the Academic Community Engagement (ACE) pedagogy, which combines community engagement with academic instruction, in a collaborative project. Through this project, KGS will build upon the research ofFerrari and Chapman, 2014in a study "Educating students to make a difference: Community-based service learning." Service learning was found to have positive effects on engaging students in organized service activities. In their review of the existing literature, they note, "These initiatives include service-learning projects that students complete in collaboration with community partners. They argued that garden-based service-learning projects like these offer an effective pedagogical strategy for emphasizing a hands-on, social justice-oriented approach to learning." With the addition of more community gardening opportunities, KGS will create a paradigm shiftin the core concepts and practicessurrounding academic improvement and nutritional support to students and parents in our targeted schools.National Evaluation Group will provide aprocess evaluationwhich will monitor and document the program's implementation and provide an understanding of the relationship between specific program elements and program outcomes. Theprocess evaluationentails tracing the footsteps that KGS's staff and others involved in grant activities have taken to understand the paths traveled, and journeys started and later abandoned. This process is akin to the qualitative evaluation grounded theory approach (Soilemezi, 2018). An external evaluator with expertise in prior Federal grant evaluations and implementation will work with the director and program staff to ensure that the project is implemented with efficacy. Quantitative and qualitative performance measures and evaluations will determine whether the project is implemented as intended and has yielded positive results.Measures - Quantitative DataNumber of curriculum units created, and which content area(s) and standards it aligns with, if anyNumber, frequency, duration and type of participants in all activities including (but not limited to) students, parents, volunteers, curriculum writers, instructors, and program assistantsPre / Post data from Gardening Knowledge AssessmentPre / Post data from survey questionsbased on produce taste samplingFood preparation and tasting agenda and attendanceHarvest count dataAmount of food distributedAmount of food wastedNumber of capstone project books written and locations placedData regarding Public Service Announcements: number created, when and where presented, attendance at presentationsSocial Media posts of project and engagement dataMeasures - Qualitative DataStudent Surveys on gardening class opportunitiesTeacher Surveys of professional developmentSurveys from Experiential Gardening Exploration Institute participationThe evaluation design provides weekly / monthly / quarterly data collection for program staff, and the National Evaluation Group (over 25 years' experience in Federal grant evaluations) will provide quarterly quantitative and qualitative evaluation data feedback to project staff and the Curriculum Team to monitor participants and review the services being provided.Works Cited:Ferrari, J.R. and Chapman, J.G. (2014). Educating students to make a difference: Community-based service learning. Routledge.Greenleaf, A. T., Bryant, R. M., & Pollock, J. B. (2014). Nature-based counseling: Integratingthe healing benefits of nature into practice.International Journal for the Advancement of Counseling, 36(2), 162-174.Groenewegen, P. P., Van den Berg, A. E., De Vries.Wells, N. M. (2014). School gardens: An experiential learning approach for a nutrition educationprogram to increase fruit and vegetable knowledge, preference, and consumption among second-grade students.Journal of Nutrition Education Behaviors, 41(3), 212-217.

Progress 09/01/23 to 08/31/24

Outputs
Target Audience:The Know: Grow: Show program focuses on two schools within Tuscaloosa City Schools in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, for its initial launch. They include Central Elementary School and Oakdale Elementary School. Of the two schools, 38 students have participated in the program during the 2023-2024 academic year. 100% of these students are considered minority students, with 36 of the students being African American and 2 of the students being Hispanic. Both schools are Title I schools, meeting the federal definition of at least 40% of enrolled children living in low-income families. Outside of the elementary students, 4 undergraduate students, 1graduate student, 4professional educators and 4community members are currently involved in the program. While the students from the two schools are the main targeted audience, their work in the Know: Grow: Show program will impact their families and the entire community as they share what they learn about nutrition and the fresh produce they grow. Community partners include The House Tuscaloosa, School Yard Roots, Table of Grace Food Pantry, Stillman College, Tuscaloosa City Schools and the Tuscaloosa Regional CTE Agriculture Education Advisory Committee. Efforts to reach the intended targeted audience include: ·Direct, in-person learning activities including, but not limited to, reading books, prepared presentations, expert demonstrations and group discussions ·Hands-on gardening activities, including prepping, planting and harvesting ·Food preparation and tastings ·Local outreach and engagement opportunities ·A Capstone book reflection project ·The development of public service announcements Changes/Problems:The only problem of note was timing the germination periods of the seeds with the academic timeline of the school year. Along with this, choosing the correct seeds that would be successful in the climate of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Both of these problems, led to unsuccessful harvests in certain vegetables. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Every week Faith and Chinny, the student assistants training to be teachers, participated in shadowing following the topics covered in the Teacher Training guide.When asked about the experience, Chinny, a Stillman College Junior, said, "My semester with the garden program at Oakdale Elementary has been a journey of growth. Teaching these kids has taught me the true meaning of patience, the power of experiential learning, and the unique potential within each child." How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?While the results weren't formally disseminated, the community was made aware of both the Know: Grow: Show program and its results at a family night, which took place at the two schools. Participants' families, and members of the community, were invited to see the gardens, learn about the program and hear from the students on what new knowledge they had acquired about gardening and nutritional health through the program. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?We were happy to cover most of the goals in year one. However, in the 23-24 year, we didn't get books in any public spaces besides the schools and Table of Grace. In the next reporting period, we would like to find businesses where we can put the books.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Goal 1: To acquire knowledge of gardening Objective 1.1:Students will participate in after-school learning activities about gardening. This objective is important to establish the participants' basic knowledge of gardening and to get them involved in the hands-on aspect of gardening. A total of 39 sessions were help centered around both gardening knowledge and hands-on gardening. This included activities such as learning parts of plants, reading relevant books, completing scientific drawings as well as a number of other curricula. Objective 1.2:Students will participate in hands-on work in the community garden for an entire growing season. The purpose of this objective is for students to gain an understanding of how fruits and vegetables are grown, as well as learn basic gardening skills they can use in the future. There was a total of 21 sessions centered around hands-on gardening activities. This included planting seeds, learning about soil, creating plant markers, harvesting plants, and various other tasks related to tending to the garden. Objective 1.3:Students will demonstrate general knowledge of basic gardening practices as demonstrated by their SHOW projects. The purpose of this objective is to show evidence that the students gained knowledge from their involvement in the Know: Grow: Show program. This objective was accomplished at a family night, which took place at two of the schools. Participants' families, and members of the community, were invited to see the gardens and hear from the students about what they learned. Goal 2: To improve nutritional health of students Objective 2.1:Students will learn about the importance of including fruits and vegetables in their daily diet. This objective strives to educate participants on understanding the reasoning behind healthy eating. A total of 10 sessions in the 2023-2024 academic year were centered around nutrition. This included activities such as food preparation, reading relevant books and learning about different fruits and vegetables and what nutrient they bring to the body. When asked about her knowledge of fruits and vegetables Makiyah, a student at Central, said, "I learned that fruits and vegetables help your body grow. My favorite part was when we ate fruits all the colors of the rainbow." Objective2.2:Students will participate in taste-testing of healthy foods. This objective aims to showcase that vegetables are not only beneficial for health, but how to prepare them. This taught participants life skills, along with the grant's objective of teaching about improving nutritional health. Two activities were held, one at Central Elementary and one at Oakdale Elementary, where students cooked stir fry with their harvested vegetables. The activities hosted a total of 18 participants over the two one-hour sessions. Objective 2.3:Students will demonstrate an expanded understanding of healthy nutritional choices and will model healthy decision-making within the context of nutritional choices available to them. The purpose of this objective is to not only improve the nutritional health of the students, but to teach them how to make better choices in the future. To accomplish this, a total of 10 sessions in the 2023-2024 academic year were centered around nutrition. When asked about her experience in this objective Kensley, a student at Central, said, "I have been learning that it is not always good to eat junk food or sweets. Healthy eating helps keep your body feeling good. You have to be open to different things." Goal 3: To develop leaders engaged and serving in their communities Objective 3.1:Students will actively engage in studying nutritional choices available in their community. This objective strives to make students aware of the challenges in their communities, making them well educated citizens who understand the need for change. To meet this objective, students visited Loaves & Fishes, a local client-choice food pantry to learn about existing projects/ agencies working to address food insecurity in the community. Objective 3.2:Students will participate in activities to address food insecurity and nutritional health in their community. This objective aims to teach participants about being leaders in their communities and sharing their new knowledge to educate others. Each cohort of students worked collectively to donate the remaining produce from their gardens to individuals and families in their community. These donations took place over four activities, totaling six hours. The total number of participants for these sessions was 19. Objective 3.3:Students will share what they learn by placing published capstone project books within community businesses such as doctors' office, laundromats, and barbershops. This objective not only benefits the students by teaching them, writing and communication skills, but it also benefits the community by educating them about the same knowledge the student shave acquired. While the results weren't formally published yet, the community was made aware of both the Know: Grow: Show program and its results at a family night, which took place at two of the schools. Participants' families, and members of the community, were invited to see the gardens, learn about the program and hear from the students. Goal 4: To increase practical application of reading and writing skills Objective 4.1:Students will read books about gardening and nutritional health. The objective aims to encourage students to read grade-level appropriate books directly related to the aims of the grant. Not only does this encourage reading, but also educations the participants on the goals of the program. To achieve this objective, four activities were spent, equaling a total of four hours, reading gardening books and doing activities related to the books. The total number of participants for these sessions was 41. Objective 4.2:Students will write books detailing what they learn about gardening and nutritional health. This objective strives to help students not only learn about nutritional health and service learning, but also lead them through the five stages of the writing process. For this objective, the topics of the books were discussed, but the books were not produced. However, students learned valuable communication skills, conveying their ideas to the facilitators. Goal 5: To develop effective communication skills Objective 5.1:Students will encourage others to take advantage of service and volunteer opportunities within the Community Garden using developed Public Service Announcements. The purpose of this objective is to not only spread awareness of theKnow: Grow: Show program, but to also expand on the participants literacy skills. To accomplish this, students developed their own short video Public Service announcements. They created the scripts for them and starred in them, enhancing their writing and speaking skills.

Publications