Contributed by Chris Hattich, Farming Teacher at Stone Bridge School and Garden Program Educator at Vichy Elementary School and Bel Aire Park Magnet School

As a child, my family owned a small farm so most weekends were spent feeding livestock, flipping compost piles, weeding the garden rows, trimming the orchard, etc. In those free moments between work, I climbed trees, traipsed through the creek, wandered through the tall grass in the pastures and ate carrots straight from the soil. Lunch was often eaten with hands that were, at best, marginally clean from a hasty swipe across my dusty jeans. In short, weekends were made for getting dirty. As soon as I began my career as a Garden Educator though, it became clear just how much I had taken for granted my own childhood opportunities to get dirty.

Can we just dig a hole today?” asked one of my fourth grade students as we huddled together underneath the makeshift overhang of our garden classroom. “Can we … just … dig a hole … today?” I repeated back like some perplexed mynah bird. “Yeah, just dig a hole,” the same student replied, this time with a greater degree of confidence that his request might actually be considered. Being a firm believer in allowing student interest and inquiry to help drive programs, I was all in.

School Garden programs naturally foster a sense of accomplishment. A seed becomes a plant that becomes a fruit that becomes food. A giant pile of compost who’s nutrition, shovelful by shovelful, gets dispersed into a dozen garden beds. In Teaching In Nature’s Classroom, Nathan Larson writes “for many young people, gardens are so fun because you get to do real work. Children thoroughly enjoy the opportunity to use real tools to plant seeds, tend crops, cultivate garden beds, and roll wheelbarrow loads of wood chips and compost.” Beyond just those dirty hands and muddy feet, there is a tangible result from all of that work which students can both see and eat.

I’ve had the pleasure of working at four different schools over my career, each of which has offered a very different sentiment about students getting dirty. For one school in particular, students eagerly awaited cloudy skies, celebrating the chance to use the rows of rain slickers and rubber boots that line the hallways. But for other schools, rainy days were a hard “no-go” in the garden, as were the ensuing days that followed as we patiently waited for Mother Nature to dry the ground up. For the latter schools, I always wondered if the goal was to prevent dirty students or to prevent dirty classrooms. Most assuredly, those are very different things.

Beyond the developmental benefits of outdoor work, research suggests that getting dirty may actually provide students with physiological benefits as well. Coined the “hygiene hypothesis” in 1989 by epidemiologist Dr. David Strachan, this theory suggests that early childhood exposure to allergy-inducing pathogens may help prevent the onset of allergies later in life. This theory has since been studied and refined into the term “targeted hygiene,” which suggests that “increased social exposure through sport, other outdoor activities, less time spent indoors, diet and appropriate antibiotic use, may help restore the microbiome and perhaps reduce risks of allergic disease,” according to a 2016 Perspect Public Health study. Restoring ideal gut microflora has been linked to a strong immune system, decreased incidence of anxiety and depression, greater cardiovascular health and reduced allergies and asthma. 

Overwhelmingly, the chance to get dirty in a school garden offers opportunities and experiences that simply cannot be replicated within the walls of a traditional classroom. When provided with a comfortable setting and the appropriate tools to do so, even the most dirt-phobic students can find themselves endlessly engaged.  Whether planting a seed, shoveling compost or just digging a hole, this form of “real work” can provide social, developmental and physiological benefits that many students are missing. So don’t be afraid to go out and GET DIRTY!

References:

Larson, Nathan. Teaching In Nature’s Classroom. 2015. Environmental Design Lab Press.

Bloomfield SF, Rook GA, Scott EA, Shanahan F, Stanwell-Smith R, Turner P. Time to abandon the hygiene hypothesis: new perspectives on allergic disease, the human microbiome, infectious disease prevention and the role of targeted hygiene. Perspect Public Health. 2016 Jul;136(4):213-24. doi: 10.1177/1757913916650225. PMID: 27354505; PMCID: PMC4966430.