STEAM PageLab: Heritage Garden

Our new Heritage Garden PageLab engages girls with STEAM learning that builds on our tradition of place-based learning.

In this pop-up outdoor classroom, participants explore a garden through multiple lenses: through the layer of science inquiry –learning about plants and seeds, growth processes, and soil composition; through the layer of history –asking questions about the natural history of a garden built on the site of an old farm; and through a layer of documentary arts –creating a visual diary of observations.

Our Heritage Garden Lab draws connections to the past. We learn about indigenous agricultural traditions, like companion planting of the “Three Sisters” (squash, beans, and corn), which emphasizes connections between plants that grow in tandem, each supporting one another, like caring sisters, and helping to create healthy bodies and soil.

A young girl exploring an old barnCurious Anna - Leah Lisenbee
Two chicken eggs in a bed of shredded paperEggs - Brooke Cody
A bird in a treeThe Bird - Maria McDaris
A creekbedFlowing Creek - Gracie Garrett
A closeup of a white wildflowerWildflower - Bobbie Reaume
A greenhouse with potted plantsGreenhouse Plants - Aubrey VanBumble
An old barnHistory of the Garden - Gracie Garrett
A young girl relaxing on top of a large signChilling Leah - Anna Ingle
Creek water and stonesThe Creek - Tiffany Reaume
A small shoot growing in the groundSpider - Sophia VanBumble
Chicken Coop doorChicken Coup - PAGE interns
PAGE girls who participated in the Summer 2021 Heritage Garden Lab made photographs that collectively present a portrait of a place.

The garden emerged from the creative vision of Madison Middle School Science teachers James Calloway and Lindsey Montgomery. Throughout 2020, they reworked their 7th-grade science curriculum to frame it around an outdoor teaching garden next to the school that includes a chicken coop, compost pile and multiple raised beds they created with their students. They served as Project Facilitators for our PageLab in 2021 and led our students in building a PAGE Permaculture Orchard.

Local biologist Lucy Lowe, a native of the Spring Creek farming community and an expert on Appalachian-grown plants, serves as Project Facilitator for our After-School PageLab in the Fall and Spring. Project deliverables include Illustrated Lab Journals, where girls record observations, questions, and emerging theories, and cyanotype photography using sunlight to develop images of plants.

PAGE girls tending to a garden
3 PAGE girls writing notes while standing outside a weathered barn
PAGE girls tending to a garden, planting seeds
PAGE girls writing outdoors under a tent
3 PAGE girls writing in their notebooks while observing hens
PAGE girl taking a photograph
A group of PAGE girls sitting in a circle outdoors
People enjoying food made from the PAGE garden veggies
Enjoy these images of our Heritage Garden Labs captured by PAGE interns and staff during the Summer and Fall of 2021.

We look forward to watching this Heritage Garden grow into a model place-based classroom that will help girls learn about science in new ways and help them become stewards of the farms and lands they will inherit.

We are very grateful for grant support from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund’s Student STEM Enrichment Program (SSEP), which has made possible this deepened investment in STEM opportunities for girls.

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