Service Learning: Campus Community Farm Workparty

Josselin Chambily

Service Learning

Campus Community Farm Workparty

1.                                                             February 16th, 2018

12:00 - 3:00pm (3 hours).

Event Organizer: Nhu Tran (Nhu.tran@email.edcc.edu) and Sofia grjal-Puche (sofia.grajal-puche@edmail.edcc.edu).

2.        The campus community farm is a project sponsored by Edmonds Community College and ran by several volunteers. The goal of the community farm is to gather students together and to make them work on gardening tasks in order to raise an eco-friendly awareness.

 Figure 1. The pile of mud/vegetations that we cleaned out the area.

 Figure 2. The pile of wood chips used to cover the muddy ground.

 Figure 3. Begining of the covering of the ground.

 Figure 4. Final result of our work.

Figure 5. Native American event: we gathered around a fire while Natives were singing songs.

3.        During the 3 hours that I spent at the community farm, we achieved a lot of work with the other students. To begin, we were ask to clear out a part of the farm which is currently being updated. Then, we had to place wood chips all over a huge area to allow cars and working vehicules to park here without getting stuck in the mud. To finish, we arranged tables, chairs and benches around the farm in order to prepare for a Native American event taking place few hours later.

4.        Being a student at Edmonds Community college, I am a part of a community. Prior to this service learning assignment, I didn't really realize that. However, the fact that we all gathered together with other students in order to share this moment with few Native Americans made me feel like a part of a community for the first time. Even if we didn't do anything specially related to biology on this day, I understand how the farm can contribute to teach this community about sciences such as botany or entomology and hand over manual skills in the same time with these service learning activities. This knowledge of sciences may seem as insignificant or futile, but it's a part of a whole process of learning that contribute to the global education of our community, and on a larger scale, our society. In this way, this kind of service learning contribute so promote sciences to our community on its own scale. Therefore, I believe it's important to make students do service learning hours because it will open their minds in order to become better beings.

5.        The purpose of my service learning work was to prepare the farm to receive a Native American event, to which I attended few hours later. During this party, multiple Native American people were present to host the event. After listening to them talking during the whole afternoon, they made me realize the importance of preserving Native American culture in the State of Washington. In their culture, actions such as sharing goods and food, listening of everyone's opinion and respecting the environment are the basis of everything. For someone like me that has been shaped by our society to over consume and to prefer individualism since my young age, their words made me reassess my own personality. For example, I re-evaluated the true importance of my daily routine and I understood that simple moments such as sharing a piece of salmon around a fire while listening to authentic Indian songs can be more meaningful than most of the superficial things we do everyday. Also, they were insisting on the fact that we have to recenter ourselves on our relationship with our environment. I believe that this kind of service learning activities are crucial to raise awareness about our planet and its issues like the effects of global warming for example. Combined with scientifical explanations that we can learn in colleges like in our biology class, it will be these projects that will change our community's psyche on the long term and get things moving for a sustainable future in our bioregion.

6.        - How long does a soil take in order to renew itself ?

           - Why the pile of wood chips that we used was releasing so much ''smoke'' when we                                digging close to its center ?

           - What are different measures taken by the State of Washington in order to preserve the Native                American culture ?

           - How long does it take to build a Native American canoe, from the day you cut down the                      tree to the moment it's ready to go on water ?

           - How are salmons; one of the main Native American source of food, affected by pollution ?