The School Gardeners' Southwest Desert Almanac

A Garden-Based Science Teaching Network

Launched February 5-7, 2020

Explore how educators from 5 southwestern states with cold & warm deserts are advancing an ecoregion almanac for garden-based science teaching.

What is the School Gardeners’ Southwest Desert Almanac?

The School Gardeners’ Southwest Desert Almanac is a conference that brought together educators and researchers to explore common opportunities and challenges related to garden-based science teaching in one US ecoregion: the southwest warm and cold deserts. With generous support from National Science Foundation, participants explored how an ecoregional approach to garden-based science teaching (GBST) can enhance and expand learning opportunities in elementary schools.

This website serves as an enduring repository for supporting, sustaining, and spreading garden-based science teaching across the ecoregion in four ways: curating resources specific to the region on a variety of topics; sharing local case studies of GBST, writing papers that characterize opportunities and challenges of GBST for practitioners, researchers, and designers; and mapping out underlying patterns and principles that cut across GBST ecoregion programs.

Using the idea of an almanac as both process for and product of conference learning, an ecoregion approach seeks to establish a democratic foundation for equity and excellence in science education.

The southwest desert ecoregion educator network concentrates on cold and warm deserts in the United States, which encompass one of several North American ecoregions defined in this US EPA ecoregion map.

Explore the ideas that inspire us

Find out what we are accomplishing together

See what's news since we convened the conference

Check out what The School Gardener's Southwest Desert Almanac has enabled us to accomplish since we parted ways on February 7, 2020

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