Planting Seeds, Feeding Young Minds

by Grace Cajski

Nearly two decades ago, Eliza Lathrop, an American Studies teacher at Punahou, heard her students groan, “ugh, ʻsustainability.’ We already did that!” This was a lightbulb moment for Lathrop. She wanted to instill that “sustainability” was not a topic that one could master or ever be done with.

“What I picked up on, in that moment, was a lack of connection to the land, to the resources, to understanding your relationship and connection to this place we were asking our students to sustain,” she said.

Since that 2007 moment, Lathrop has become Punahou School’s K-12 garden resource teacher, dedicating herself to teaching at the intersection of food and sustainability, with a crucial hands-on, food-centric component to her classes. “Students need to know where things come from, what sustains us, and how food is such a critical element of our relationship to land, to place, to history, to culture. When we lose that connection, then we lose the whole meaning of belonging to a place.”

Since the early 2000s, many private, public, and charter schools in Hawaiʻi have adopted or grown their ʻāina-based (place-based) education and food systems education programs.

The School for Examining Essential Questions of Sustainability (SEEQS), an innovative charter middle school in Honolulu, recently established a new EQS class exploring why what we eat matters. Led in part by Viola Gaskell, a former food journalist, this group of thirty-one 11- to 13-year-olds has foraged for edible food along the Aiea Loop Trail with botanist Dr. Nat Bletter; started a school garden with kalo (taro) and uala (sweet potatoes); worked in the loʻi (taro patch) of Kākoʻo ʻŌiwi farm; and learned about local food hubs at the Wahiawā Product Development Center. Now, the students are creating their own short films about food, with topics ranging from food miles and food culture to the adventure of harvesting your own food. To Gaskell, this class offers students something more substantial than field trips and fun projects: students learn how to think critically about their environment and resources, and can bring that curiosity home to their families. Now, on the way home from school, students are teaching their parents about food sovereignty.

At Kamehameha Schools, Patricia Louis created a new elective course this year to teach 6th-grade students about native fishes, including ʻamaʻama (striped mullet). Together, the students are developing a game to teach others what they have learned over the semester. At a school that already has a robust ‘āina-based curriculum, this class gives students the freedom to create and develop their own projects after hearing from local experts: Kirk Kamanu, who operates a community non-profit, taught students how to filet mullet; Tyson Arasato, Waiʻanae High School’s Marine Science Learning Center teacher, taught students about operating a fish hatchery; Luke Mead, the director of Kumuola Marine Science Education Center, taught students about loko iʻa (fishpond) caretaking. Louis hopes that her students leave the course knowing how to identify and curate information resources.

“I wanted them to see the importance of ancestral knowledge,” Louis said. “To find information about ʻamaʻama specific to our culture, we had to go to sources outside the internet or a book. We have to go to primary sources that were traditionally passed down by our ancestors.”

Waiāhole Elementary has also begun implementing more mauka-to-makai project-based learning, and since Waiāhole is an agricultural community, the school has been integrating food into their curriculum for more than two decades. Each September, the whole school gathers to plant a field of corn (joining together in the Corn Song: “Everything you eat/Everything you wear/Sun, soil, water, and air.”). The students use the plot to learn how to measure perimeter and area, then use that information to estimate the number of corn stalks ears of corn. Then the school gathers once again in November to harvest the crop.

“Our kuleana is to teach the kids not only who they are and where they come from,” said principal Alexandra Obra, “but how to use the resources within the ahupuaʻa, make sure they can take care of themselves, their families, their community.”

On Hawaiʻi Island, Waimea Middle School founded Mālaʻai: The Culinary Garden in 2005, based on the belief that school gardens are essential spaces for cultivating wellness, learning, and a sense of place. The program’s success spawned the broader Hawaiʻi Island School Garden Network (HISGN) in 2008, which now supports more than 60 garden schools, providing mentorship, curriculum resources, and professional development rooted in ʻāina-based education.

“School gardens cultivate a deeper connection between keiki and ʻāina, while improving academic achievement and mental health,” said Sarah Freeman, Hawaiʻi County’s food system economic development specialist. Freeman was a farm manager who supported farm-to-school and garden-to-cafeteria pilot programs, and now works with partners across the island. Recently, Mālaʻai and HISGN launched a new program to help train the educators, too; Ke Kumu Uluwehi Mentorship Program supports teachers in Kona, Kohala, and Hāmākua, strengthening the connections between educators, their culture, communities, and land.

Over time, these programs have become seeds of change and hope. Dr. Anthony Mau, one of Lathrop’s students, now operates Kupu Place Aquaponics, the largest microgreen and edible flower farm in Hawaiʻi. “There was no [particular] outcome that Ms. Lathrop wanted, just to connect us and ground us… She facilitated that growth of identifying what we were seeking in life and just going for it,” said Mau.

Having students remain in the state and plugged into the community are goals that many of the teachers shared with me. “This is the next generation,” Obra had noted. “They are going to protect and preserve this space.”

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