Exploring the Relationship between School Gardens, Food Literacy and Mental Well-Being in Youth Using Photovoice
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Materials and Methods
2.1. Photovoice
2.2. Ethics and Participants
2.3. Project Steps
3. Results
3.1. Text and Images
3.2. Evidence of Food Literacy
For me [I] like food workshops, we make foods; I like to make pizza, or pretzels. Pretzel is fun.
It’s really about the skills, something you gonna do when you grow up.
Between cooking and gardening we use cooking more in the future because we have to eat.
A lot of the stuff [my grandfather] showed me are pretty simple things that gave me a little head start with teaching the kids… how to plant things, like how far do they have to be, like the spacing. Making sure that if they have to dig something up, if there’s a rock or something, try to find a way around it, not just dig the rock out. And leave the rock somewhere else far away from the plant.
It’s easier in the garden to talk about and learn about other people.
I always go with my mom to the market, like supermarket or market place, buy vegetables and rice, so I know how to pick them. Like choosing apples or oranges as fruits, or cabbage something like that.
Although it’s fun and rewarding, it’s a lot of work to grow something and when it dies you’re kind of a little bit sad but it’s part of it I guess and you kind of realize how much work it is, like to grow one plant, it took us a lot of work and then I think about the farmers that do like that for a living and then I’m like, you kind of realize how hard they work and you appreciate it more.
4. Discussion
Author Contributions
Funding
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
References
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Sub-Theme | Sample Participant Responses |
---|---|
Relationship | Well, the most I can say is I’ve never seen—well, like, if I have, it’s very rare, but I’ve never seen, like, both youth and seniors working together, and it’s gardening. And like, because usually when it’s—when I think of teenagers, I think of people, like, using their phones every five minutes, and this is not something I saw during the times we were gardening. And so yeah, that’s just something I noticed. And it was very interesting, and you need to see something like that, to see it, that gardening can do this to people. |
Community | I’ve seen it in gardening mostly, that people do come together of all ages. Like, you don’t need a lot of experience or not a lot of knowledge to actually be able to do gardening. Like, you can just pick up and do something in the smallest way and it can help. And you see, like, the actual growth and the actual outcome of your own efforts, so it’s really rewarding. |
Well, I see people laughing, making jokes about small things, and just enjoying the process of gardening. It’s not—it’s not really actual gardening, but it’s working with other people, other peers. And—yeah. | |
Respect | I think that the biggest thing is that when you’re gardening, that there’s kind of like a sense of, like, no judgment of what you’re doing in the moment. So you can share your opinions and really get to—get to know people from, like, a different point of view, and get to see, like, what their skills that they’re good at. So in terms of mental wellbeing, I would say it really makes you find that connection of what you’re good at, and makes you feel good about yourself in the end. |
Sub-Theme | Sample Participant Responses |
---|---|
Self-discovery | You don’t always have to be around others, and especially for youth, at my age or—we kind of feel the need to fit in and always be around people, like social media and things like that. But I think what’s more important is, like, finding that balance in order to solve that problem, and finding that balance might mean something like gardening or, like, doing something else you love. |
Well, especially this age, it’s just, it comes from peers, like, kind of that pressure to always fitting—to always fit in and, like, always be talking to other people, but sometimes we have to take that time off for ourselves, for, like, self-growth, and how we can still be bright and colorful just on our own. Well, it’s again, like, taking time, doing things like gardening and like, finding that balance in our lives, just focusing on multiple things, not just one, in order to—in order for that self-growth to happen. | |
how gardening, it—there’s, like—it can relate to everyday life, not—it’s not just gardening. | |
Future | I would say give the opportunity to students to actually bring out what they think is important, and to not only teach what is part of the curriculum, but something that could help nurture what they want to do in life. |
Sub-Theme | Sample Participant Responses |
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Nutrition | When I started working in the garden, I started to feel this great connection with the things. I grew, and I started to care more about what I was eating. |
When you’re the one who grew the food, like, it just adds that extra sort of excitement and makes you want to eat the food. | |
We heal ourselves using the foods we eat. So that’s part of the problem I see, is that people don’t care enough about the—about themselves and their health and the environment, the planet, because that’s all connected. | |
Relaxation | It’s therapeutic in some way actually. Like, touching the soil is actually calm—not calm—like, calming, but, like, it’s nice to just garden and get your hands dirty and grow stuff and seeing it grow, watching it grow. |
[Gardening] gave me more friends I guess and it’s kind of like what I said last time is [it’s] like a safe place where I can escape from problems or stress that I have during school and instead I can embrace the things that make me happy. | |
It calms me and allows me to think, not negatively, but logically. |
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Lam, V.; Romses, K.; Renwick, K. Exploring the Relationship between School Gardens, Food Literacy and Mental Well-Being in Youth Using Photovoice. Nutrients 2019, 11, 1354. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu11061354
Lam V, Romses K, Renwick K. Exploring the Relationship between School Gardens, Food Literacy and Mental Well-Being in Youth Using Photovoice. Nutrients. 2019; 11(6):1354. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu11061354
Chicago/Turabian StyleLam, Vanessa, Kathy Romses, and Kerry Renwick. 2019. "Exploring the Relationship between School Gardens, Food Literacy and Mental Well-Being in Youth Using Photovoice" Nutrients 11, no. 6: 1354. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu11061354