How a Community Garden Educates

The community garden at International School of Dakar (ISD) flourishes across several spaces on campus, and its presence supports environmental awareness and compassion for nature. The impact of the garden is not just as a green space, but also as a space to support learning, to foster well-being, and to transfer skills and knowledge inside and outside the classroom.

The garden has seen a renewal this school year, led by Abdoulaye Gueye, a horticultural consultant and instructor, and the ACE! Garden Project, which also focuses on agriculture and resilient ecologies. As one of ACE!’s 10 community engagement projects on campus, the Garden Project promotes ISD’s values of connection with the environment and community, and serves as a visible marker of campus-wide sustainable practices, such as energy efficiency, waste management, and consumption.

ISD’s Garden Project

ACE! Gardening group consists of students from Grades 6 to 12 who work with Gueye’s team to maintain the garden. Students are in the garden regularly, nurturing it as a place for engaged, meaningful learning. There are planter boxes near classrooms across the campus, where students are building soil with compost to learn about decomposition and how to enrich soil, before planting in the gardens on campus. There are also After-school Activities for students on gardening, and there is a collection process for organic food waste from the ISD community for composting.

“A thriving community garden will comprise learning spaces across campus, which can be leveraged for teaching systems thinking, resilience, nutrition, the importance of biodiversity, and climate-related inquiry, environmental responsibility, compassion for nature,” said Rebecca Gillman, ISD’s Community Engagement and Service Learning Coordinator.

ISD’s vision is a community that leads, inspires, and impacts global change with compassion and wisdom. We aim to nurture each learner’s growth through an IB education, but it's the what and why of education that matter most. The ISD Community Garden and garden project foster healthy lifestyle habits, an understanding of sustainable food systems, systems thinking, food security, and resilience—helping make the vision for the next hundred years not just aspirational but achievable. 

Through the Gardening Project, student learning inside and outside of the classroom is abundant across the Primary Years Programme (PYP), Middle Years Programme (MYP), and the Diploma Programme (DP). The program also creates opportunities for interdisciplinary learning while supporting IB sustainability-focused standards and lifelong learning.

Starting in Elementary School

Wangari Maathai, the environmental activist and Nobel Prize winner, said: "Education, if it means anything, should not take people away from the land, but instill in them even more respect for it."

Students in Grades 2, 3, and 5 are setting an example this year by integrating the Garden Project within the IB PYP Units of Inquiry. 

In Grade 2’s Unit of Inquiry: Sharing the Planet, students explore impacts on the environment and actions to reduce their “footprint” on campus. This unit teaches students about ecosystems, i.e., the gardens, and their connection to precious plastics and sustainable art practices. Students explore food waste and composting sensitization, collecting compost after lunch.

In Grade 3’s Unit of Inquiry: How We Organize Ourselves, students will explore the structure and function of living things within ecosystems and how they adapt. They will learn about how ecosystems survive despite threats such as other invasive species. Through this unit, students will learn about using research skills to write persuasive texts about ecosystems. They will also be introduced to the Dewey decimal system. 

In Grade 5’s Unit of Inquiry: How We Organize Ourselves, students will learn about sustainable food systems, food webs, and chains. Other topics include the impact of supply and demand on people’s livelihoods and well-being. Students will compose informational texts on food sources and mathematically learn about decimals, conversions, algebra, and patterns in nature. The unit will connect directly to local resources such as corossol, bissap, and avocado. 

Even ISD’s younger learners, in PreKindergarten, are collaborating with the neighboring school to start planting beds outside their classrooms and planting together, as part of their learning, in and out of the classroom.

Each unit of inquiry allows students to transfer skills and knowledge across multiple disciplines, helping them find connections between what they’re learning in each class, whether it is data handling with the creation of charts and graphs, or creating art through recycled materials. 

Through the development of these units, the ISD community garden promotes student agency and co-curricular involvement, fosters environmental stewardship, and supports well-being, socioemotional learning, and healthy lifestyles.

Learning Today for Future Sustainability

There is a quote by the famous “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” star, Audrey Hepburn: “To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.”

While the core curriculum is important, educating the whole child requires interweaving learning that builds essential life skills alongside academic practice. The Garden Project encourages collective responsibility and informed sustainable action, reinforcing reduction, reuse, and recycling through its connected units. These experiences foster habits that support healthy lifestyles and environmental care, helping students understand their impact on Earth and what it means to live responsibly.

As a school, the community garden also helps shift the ISD campus toward sustainable practices through composting organic waste to support soil health and garden ecology. Through collaboration with local partners such as Recuplast and Plastic Odyssey, the school extends its environmental awareness and impact beyond campus. It provides students with authentic opportunities to see sustainability in real community contexts.

“We need to provide opportunities for our learners to take informed, responsible action and practise active hope throughout the school year so that they can develop the competencies and skills necessary to navigate their uncertain futures,” said Gillman.

Active hope means we believe in the power to create positive change and take action to move towards that. The sustainability of the future depends on our students — so we have to ask ourselves, what do we choose to cultivate today? 

Educating our students to plant gardens is ultimately educating them to believe in and prepare for tomorrow.