Teens as Teachers in the Garden: Cultivating a Sustainable Model for Teaching Healthy Living

Abstract

School gardens are an ideal space to deliver a healthy living curriculum, such as nutrition and physical activity education, to elementary school youth. However, public schools often lack the resources and support to establish sustainable garden-based programming. We created the Healthy Living Ambassador program, a collaborative after-school garden program in low-income communities that brought together resources from schools, community programs, and University of California Cooperative Extension. This school garden program featured culturally competent teens as teachers to serve as near-peer educators and mentors to elementary school youth. The program development model incorporated lessons from sustainable community-based health program interventions and essential elements of teens-as-teachers programs. We share the program logic model and discuss the successes and challenges of this program model that we encountered while developing a long-term, maintainable community garden program to teach healthy living.

Development and Pilot Testing of a Food Literacy Curriculum for High School-Aged Adolescents

“…Additionally, these programs allow opportunities for team building and improve peer relationships [ 62 ] while also encouraging implementation of cooking skills for younger youth at home [ 74 ]. A long-term nutrition and gardening program utilizing teen teachers for elementary-aged youth provides an excellent example and highlights the scalability of a program of this nature [ 75 , 76 ]. Applying this model employs adolescents that are culturally competent being from the same community and living within the same contexts as the younger youth they are teaching [ 76 ].…”

“…A long-term nutrition and gardening program utilizing teen teachers for elementary-aged youth provides an excellent example and highlights the scalability of a program of this nature [ 75 , 76 ]. Applying this model employs adolescents that are culturally competent being from the same community and living within the same contexts as the younger youth they are teaching [ 76 ].…”

“…Adolescents have been found to be as effective, if not more effective than adult educators [ 77 ]. Cross-age teaching programs provide opportunities for community service for teen teachers in addition to opportunities for improving the health and self-efficacy of participants, whether teaching or learning, and increasing opportunities for introducing food literacy concepts to youth [ 72 , 75 , 76 , 78 , 79 ]. Beyond food literacy-related constructs, cross-age teaching is also beneficial for developing leadership, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills that are essential as adolescents mature [ 80 , 81 ].…”