The Learning Gardens Laboratory (LGLab) is a project of the Portland International Initiative for Leadership in Ecology, Culture, and Learning (PIIECL) at Portland State University. The LGLab was established in 2005 through a partnership between PSU, the Portland Public Schools (PPS), and the City of Portland; its purpose is to meet the diverse learning needs of children and youth, educators, parents and PSU students by offering demonstration, curriculum development, research, consultancy, and participatory exploration in food- and garden-based teaching and learning.
The LGLab is geared to serve multicultural, low-income outer Southeast Portland neighborhoods, children, and parents/families; our primary PPS partner is Lane Middle School, located across the street from our 10 acres. Through the LGLab project, we have developed a model of creating edible gardens, growing food, preparing and eating meals, composting and recycling, and integrating different subject areas to help improve student achievement. Following permaculture and whole systems principles, the LGLab site is uniquely designed such that each element (soil, water, sunlight, biomass, plants, people, and sustainable technologies) is connected to the others.
Over the course of four years students in a Training and Development course worked to design, implement, and evaluate formal training for seniors who worked as Foster Grandparent's with school aged children. The focus was on specific trainings each term. For example, students designed diversity training, self-esteem training, and literacy trainings. The students became versed in understanding the client organization, the seniors, as well as the needs of the children served by these seniors.
The International School is located in downtown Portland and is a private pre-K to 5th grade elementary school which has language tracks in Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese. The school gives more financial aid than almost any other private school in the area according to an Oregonian article. Students in a Senior Capstone worked with the Director of Marketing at the International School to enhance the training for their teachers, to survey the Portland community about the International School, to target specific markets for the school, to overhaul the school's advertising materials such as brochures and the website and to create a more focused funnel from initial contact to enrollment. The new webpage follows many of the students' formal recommendations.
This Capstone class brings together PSU students and Sustainable Northwest, a non-profit organization that promotes environmentally sound economic development in regional communities. In the class, students will document sustainable business practices in the Pacific Northwest using oral history methodologies.
Project 10-9 focuses on the development of speech enabled information access by police officers from inside, as well as outside their patrol vehicle.
