Garden Logos - November 2021

Throughout the semester, I have been thinking about how students can reflect on the Fall session of garden classes at McNear. I have been experimenting with using sites like Canva and Vengage in the hope that kids could create infographics to communicate about some of the issues we have touched upon in the garden, but I keep running into the same frustration, that these sites in addition to Google Slides and Powerpoint allow users to rely so heavily on preloaded templates and stock images that the presentations end up seeming impersonal and flat.

This speaks to the larger question of how kids can authentically and creatively make and communicate meaning from their experiences, especially when the delivery is digital. How to enable and empower them to create and disseminate images from their own hands, heads and hearts? And how to allow them to conceptualize this process?

I decided to call it a logo for the school garden and I pitched it as if we needed to create an image that would express why we felt the garden was important and worth having in our school. This seemed to really click and the initial results are positive, despite some obstacles such as having harvest tasks to get to and running out of time. Plus an unexpected rain wreaked havoc on drawings done in washable marker. Such are the pitfalls of the outdoor classroom! Colored pencils from here on in.