School gardens are hard to maintain but yield academic, social-emotional, and environmental benefitsThis systematic literature review sought to synthesize both the benefits of school gardens and the barriers to implementing them successfully. The last review of this nature was published in 2009, so the authors wanted an updated overview of school gardening research. Plus, most reviews have focused only on the benefits—not the barriers—which hinders practitioners’ efforts to establish and maintain successful gardens for school children. The article’s overarching aim was to provide a single point of reference to help scholars, teachers, and nature advocates to understand the benefits of school gardens, the barriers, and strategies to overcome them.
To create an updated and comprehensive overview of the field, the Australian authors conducted a systematic literature review of research on school gardens. They limited their study selection criteria to studies of elementary school children which included both benefits of and barriers to successful school gardens. In addition, they limited their search to studies published since 2010 to build upon the previously published 2009 review. They identified 28 qualifying studies, including quantitative and qualitative methods, and analyzed them thematically to distill dominant patterns of benefits and barriers in the research literature.
The findings section includes helpful charts which provide a comprehensive overview of the academic, physical, wellbeing, social, and environmental benefits of school gardens and the barriers to school gardens. The academic benefits of school gardens included more student engagement in learning, academic learning, and curriculum integration. Healthy eating and increased physical activity topped physical health benefits of school gardens. Social-emotional benefits included better student well-being and greater autonomy, confidence, and resilience. Social benefits included stronger interpersonal relationships between the school community and surrounding community, heightened social engagement, food resilience, and social capital. Finally, school gardens strengthened children’s connections to nature and environmental knowledge and understanding. In addition to listing benefits for primary school students, the review also touched upon benefits for teachers. Across the studies, for example, school gardens afforded teachers more opportunities to implement relevant and engaging pedagogies, make real-world connections, integrate subject areas, and experiment with curriculum and pedagogy. The most common barriers to school gardens were lack of funding, lack of time, lack of school administrator support, limited school staffing, limited staff training, and rigid curriculum and testing requirements that work against integrating school garden programming with academic learning.
Overall, these findings indicate that school gardens provide many benefits for elementary students, teachers, schools, and communities. The review also identified consensus around the primary barriers that work against successful school garden programming. Based on these patterns of findings, the authors advocate that schools forge stronger relationships with the broader community to create and maintain successful school gardens. In addition to increasing parental and community buy-in, stronger school-community partnerships can lead to volunteer support, donations, and local fundraising to alleviate some of the financial, time, and staffing barriers to school gardens. Likewise, parental and community support often leads to school administrators shifting more support to school gardens. School gardens seem more likely to succeed when they’re entrenched in the community—not just the school.
The Bottom Line