Northeast Farm to School: A Podcast

Episode 1.6 Transcript

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Buzz, Flow, and Grow: Exploring STEAM with Bees, Fish and Gardens with Brian Winslow, K-4 STEAM Teacher, Southwick School (NH)

Dinah: Welcome to Farm to School Northeast, a podcast where we explore the creative ways that local food is getting into school cafeterias and how food system education is playing out in classrooms and school gardens across the northeast. Today we have an opportunity to sit down with Brian Winslow, a K-4 STEAM teacher from the Southwick School in Northfield, New Hampshire, to talk about their dynamic program that includes a greenhouse aquaponics, an apiary, and schoolwide composting. Welcome Brian.

Brian: Thank you for having me

Dinah: Brian, can you introduce yourself to the listeners and in particular share how your work and interests are connected to the topic of farm to school?

Brian: Sure. So I’m at the Southwick School, as you mentioned, that’s just at the southern edge of the Lakes region in New Hampshire. I’ve been teaching here for 20 years. I was a music teacher for 13 and the principal 13, well, eight years ago now, the principal that was here then wanted to change the title one program to be a more experientially based program, and he was very inspired to have students start learning about agriculture. So at that time, the school received a large title one grant called the Sidney Grant, where a school had been a school in need of improvement- we’re a full title one school. And previously most schools had used that kind of funds for iPads and technology programs, but he wanted to invest in a greenhouse and invest in a change of program that could be a lot more experientially based. And I worked with him to plan that as I was the music teacher because I had previously worked at a plant nursery when I was a child, the Van Bergham Plant nursery in Deerfield, New Hampshire.

I had a lot of experience in greenhouses and I had done a very small CSA model farm from my house in Northwood where I live. We live in an old farmhouse, and I was just exploring, I guess some other opportunities and kind of honestly burning out from teaching music in elementary school. So I worked with him to plan this program out, how to spend those funds, at least how to set something up. And then they asked me to apply for it- for the position. And at first it was not called the STEAM position. I probably wouldn’t have applied because most STEM or STEAM programs are very technology based, but it was set up as a greenhouse and aquaponics program and that was something I felt fairly comfortable with. Aquaponics was kind of new for me, but I understood the concept, but I had a lot of experience with greenhouses, so it morphed pretty quickly. Terminology in public education is kind of important. So it became more encompassing as a STEAM program. And that’s pretty much how we got started. This is our eighth year. The school has changed as the district has changed. They closed down one school and it went from being a 3,4, and 5 school to a K-4 school as it is now. And then it’s changing again. We were a title one program. The district has adopted it throughout the district and including to the schools that are not Title one schools. So now it’s a locally funded program and my job will continue to change as I’ll be between the Suffolk School next year and another school in the district that’s starting a STEAM program as well. So it’s going pretty well here. And again, it’s rooted in agriculture, particularly like the greenhouse construction that we did and wanting to do an aquaponics program inside of there as well.

Dinah: Can you walk us through the STEAM program at your school? There seems like there’s so many interesting components from pollinators to gardens to aquaculture. How is the program organized?

Brian: Yeah, the program is organized as a standard unified arts class. So students that are here, every student at the Southlake School comes to their STEAM class. They do that one day a week for a 40 minute block, just as they also do for art and music, physical education, and technology. So I’m on that schedule. I get to work with all of the students, which is wonderful. And because it was originally conceived of as a program designed to increase engagement through experiential learning where we integrate math and science into hands-on projects here. and with focus really in agriculture, that has how it’s grown into what it is today. I had been a beekeeper before. I was the STEAM teacher here and I was doing an enrichment class in addition to teaching music. I was teaching in educational jargon, it’s RTI or a response to intervention, which is like pullout programs.
They’ve replaced gifted and talented programs. It’s kind of the same idea for the students at the top, but it also allows teachers to focus on students that have a deficit in one particular area. It’s a common model in public education, but I was helping to support that by taking some of the students looking for enrichment and teaching a beekeeping course that was integrating math at the fourth and fifth grade level. And that was, I think part of the reason I was asked to start this program was I had experience in greenhouses. I was having experiences as a beekeeper and I had been teaching for a while and was comfortable working with this age group. So we do still have an apiary. We do a beekeeping program. Students have to go through the beekeeping curriculum with me first, which they all do. It’s pollinators and beekeeping.
So the students that don’t ever want to become beekeepers are still getting things out of that. And then the students that do want to get hands-on experience, it’s an option. They have to do a permission slip from their parents so that they know what they’re doing. They take a recess time and instead of going out on the playground, they put on a bee jacket or a B suit and come with me to the apiary and open up some beehives and experience beekeeping how that program works. We also do as many hands-on experiential things in agriculture, but also tend to do ecology as well, kind of like an intersection between agriculture and ecology. So one of the other programs that we do is the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department does a program called the Trout in the Classroom program where they give students, they give schools that have the equipment, trout eggs for Eastern Brook Trout.
I took a workshop on how to care for them and raise them, and then I work with students on raising the fish from eggs until they’re fry and can be released in the river and they give you a stocking permit to do that. So those are the kinds of programs they’re doing with the greenhouse. It’s just so natural for me anyways, it’s so natural to integrate math into what we’re doing there because elementary math is, they’re learning multiplication, so they’re learning surface area, and we’re planning out the space that we have for plants in our grow beds there. We’re figuring out the volume of soil that’s needed. Those are the kinds of things that are really hands-on and relevant for that age group with the younger students who are doing a lot of measurement of plant heights and then plotting them on line plots and things like that. Those are really a lot of what elementary math students are trying to work on and get hands-on experience with. So just trying to make it a bit more real for them and relevant for them.

Dinah: So do you divide your program by grade level? Every grade gets to have interaction with the garden, the aquaculture and the pollinator, or how do you organize it that way?

Brian: Yeah, I organize some of the main ideas for different grade levels. So I start beekeeping with third graders. I do discuss these- we talk about pollinators. We go to our pollinator garden and look for pollinators when they’re younger. But I really focus on the skill of beekeeping with a particular grade, for example. And I’m really trying to, of the things that we’re doing here, I’m trying to align with what they’re learning in math and science with their classroom teachers mostly to enhance what they’re doing and give them backfill with some real experience here at school. There’s nothing that’s exclusive though. I just have to pick and choose here and there. So I do focus on things to try to line it up with their teachers. But like I said, our younger students are coming in– in the summer we do a honey harvest and that’s open to everyone in the school where we open up the kitchen after we’ve removed the honey from the beehives and anyone can come in and help participate, and it’s most of all we’re trying to create or I’m trying to create experiential activities that the students can learn from.

Dinah: I just want to ask you a few questions about the apiary. We’ve experienced many educators in schools who want to get involved in beekeeping, but they have bumped into roadblocks due to perceptions of student safety with having bees near a school. Can you speak a little bit to this and how do you deal with those roadblocks and how do you get by that perception or misperception?

Brian: Yeah, absolutely. We went through that as well, and it was the Principal that started this program was adamant that we should be doing these things with our students. So I think that’s step one is just to have administrative support for what you’re trying to do. I don’t know that myself, especially as a music teacher, but even as an early STEAM teacher, I don’t know how many walls I would’ve broken down without that kind of support. So that’s critical. That being said, we immediately needed to get data to be able to answer the questions that people had because very legitimate questions about bee stings and allergies and whatnot. And we had to bring forward a plan that attempted to mitigate really all of the concerns that anyone would have. So we sited our bees on campus, but in an area where students would never accidentally be.
So for us, that’s out in the front of our school behind a chain link fence off to the side of the parking lot, which happens to be a pretty good location for bees that get some southern exposure to the sun. It’s got a tree break to the north and to the west, so it’s a good location anyways, and students are never in that area of the school property accidentally. Then we had to go to the insurance program, the school district insurance really had no problem at all. That wasn’t a barrier because bees are, they blend between livestock and wild animals, and they go wherever they want. You can’t pasture your bees, for example, and withhold them in a fence like if you had a school pig or a school sheep or something, it would be a different idea. And so from the insurance perspective, if students are going outside for recess, they’re being exposed to stinging insects and there’s not really much of a difference as long as the beehives aren’t right there on the playground where the students are regularly going to be the concern about allergies- the nurse who was here at the time actually has an anaphylactic reaction to bee venom, and she was adamant that that should not stop our students, that that’s something that schools can overcome. And the way that we well attempted to mitigate that is one, letting everyone in our school district know that we have bees here, anyone that wants to participate hands-on with the beekeeping, they do a permission slip and there’s a questionnaire about allergies and experience with being stung and whatnot. When I do bring students, I check in with the nurse so that they have– she has a record of who’s going out there. She knows exactly which students are there and when they’re there, and it’s not for that long of a time. And then annually, our school nurse will lead the staff through a short training on using an EpiPen in the case of emergency, which goes along with the students who have nut allergies and other allergies as well. So it’s not just for beekeeping, but we do that. We started doing that annually for the staff once we started the beekeeping program.

Dinah: Thank you. I think that that’s really helpful information, and I think that the way you scaffolded it in these steps will really help other schools who might be interested.

Brian: Yeah, I hope so. I mean, beekeeping is this huge, fascinating world. I very rarely do I get students when we’re learning about beekeeping and not even getting hands on, but just starting to talk about how fascinating the cast of bees are and how bees support each other and how they live their lives and what we know about them. It’s a very engaging topic that leads students towards a lot of parallel learning. It’s just wonderful for schools, but it’s also for me personally, it’s a relaxing activity. I love being with my bees in the summer on a nice day, and it’s something that I encourage people that are interested in to look into and it’s unique. It’s something that students and schools can be proud of if they’re able to pull it off.

Dinah: I know you have a focus on pollinators, and I read that you might be starting a Monarch waste station as well. And could you talk a little bit about your Monarch waystation and how do you connect that to classroom learning?

Brian: Yeah, absolutely. When I first started the STEAM program, a parent who I taught her older children, she’s a master gardener from UNH and started volunteering a lot of time and really wanted to help to put in a pollinator garden. And her name’s Sarah Marcue. I don’t know that she’s doing a lot with Master Gardeners anymore because she started her own farm and doing a lot with goat milk soap and things. And really, she’s doing great, but she lives within walking distance of the school and along with our pollinator garden, she’s just super helpful for me in the summer because I live about a 45 minute drive from the school and she can check in on the greenhouse and water things for me, and she’s wonderful. So that’s an asset to a program like this, but she really pushed forward with getting a pollinator garden in place.
And then we had students whose parents worked at, I think it was Grow Nursery is one of the tree and shrub nurseries in the area, and they were able to donate some materials. So we had students plant a garden kind of back at the far end of our playground near the woods. And part of that, in researching that and working with them on that, I learned about the Monarch Waystation Station program. We deliberately planted milkweed as well as flowering plants throughout the season so that we could support not just monarchs, but all sorts of pollinators.
And the way that I use that along with it just being a nice place to be with students, is I do a lot of data collection with students. So we do a bit of a spring survey and a fall survey where I bring students there with a worksheet, if you will, a data collection sheet on what they’re likely to see at certain times of the year. So the Monarchs we’re looking for in the fall, but we’re looking for Swallowtails in the spring and we’ll just go and we’ll stand there and they’ll just count the different, how many different insects that are landing or pollinators I should say are approaching the flowers. And then again, we use that for data representation depending on the grade level. That’s an activity I do with most of the students because it’s nice to go and look at flowers and look at who’s interacting with them and realize they’re more than just these pretty things, but these entire universes to our pollinators.
So I try to get out there twice a year in the fall and in the spring with the students and then use the data that they collect for whatever math, developmental math standard would be appropriate for the grade level. And so much of my program with math integration is data collection of different things and then doing something with those numbers because I guess part of the idea about STEAM and the math in STEAM is that math is not, I want my students to leave the elementary school understanding that math is not just numbers and operations, but it’s a way to describe the natural world and our experience, and that’s really what we’re always trying to do.

Dinah: So you’ve talked a little bit about the school garden and a little bit about the apiary. And I know that you also incorporate aquaponics and aquaculture in your program. Could you explain the difference between the two for our listeners, and could you talk a little bit about how that program works?

Brian: Yeah, absolutely. And the third term I’d have to throw in there would be hydroponics. We do all three, actually. Hydroponics, I’ll start there because we just received from the New Hampshire Department of Education is doing a pilot program where they’ve supplied a handful of schools across the state with a hydroponic grow tower. And hydroponics is a way of growing plants without soil. And our system has a pump to circulate water to the area of plant roots. Seeds are planted in rock wool, which is sort of like, I dunno, a fiberglass sort of material, but it’s not fiberglass. And that supports the plant structure of the roots and it wicks water to the roots and the water reservoir is where we put in nutrients and minerals to support the plant. And then ours, because it’s inside, has a grow light that’s on a timer for it. So that’s the practice of hydroponics.
And then aquaculture is the practice of keeping fish. We keep our Trout in the Classroom program which would be considered aquaculture because we’re growing fish and then releasing them. We also keep goldfish just, I keep them as a class pet because it’s fun to have goldfish in the class. A lot of people will obviously farm fish for eating such as tilapia in tanks in the greenhouse or the fish farms that you hear about in the ocean, different species.

And then aquaponics is the practice of doing both together where the waste from fish, the fish manure is converted into the material to support the plant nutrients. And so we have a system in the greenhouse, it’s about a 300 pound tank where we have 12 or so goldfish in there. We had done tilapia and I don’t want to, I am not going to be butchering animals with students in elementary school. It’s possible to do that, but I just don’t want to do that. So we have goldfish in there now and the waste from the goldfish, well I should say the water from the goldfish tank overflows into a bit of a solid filter and then a sump pump that pumps the water to three different grow beds where there’s a clay pellet that’s been expanded, so it’s very porous. But there’s a structure that’s there that supports bacterial growth and it’s really nitrogen fixing bacteria that we’re trying to support there. And it essentially converts the ammonia and the fish manure that’s dissolved into the water, into nitrogen and other nutrients that the plants can absorb. And I use that teaching mainly as a parallel to an ecosystem model because it’s a closed system.
You’re providing an input of food to the fish and you are taking out, I guess it’s not a closed system, you’re taking out what we grow such as lettuce or arugula or whatever we’re growing in the grow beds, but it’s cycling through very much like an ecosystem would cycle through except that we’re not feeding the greens back to the fish. We’re taking those for harvest for us. And again, farms and homesteaders can also harvest fish as another yield from that system. But as an educational model, I mean, first of all, it’s super engaging to have some really large goldfish in a big tank out in a greenhouse with students to take care of as well as they’re putting seeds into the grow beds and harvesting plants from there. There’s so much there, and it’s just a really visually simple model to how an ecosystem works as well.

Dinah: It’s really interesting that your students can also compare growing in the school garden, hydroponics and aquaponics and get that data too of what’s successful, what’s growing.

Brian: And sometimes we set up trials where we’ll plant seeds in the soil and we’ll plant seeds in the aquaponic bed at the same time, and then we will measure their growth rate and compare, and then we’ll do blind taste tests and collect data on that for other teachers. I think just anytime that you’re doing some kind of experiential activity, it’s just the beginning. It’s really like wherever you want the learning to go with that as a teacher, you’re only limited I think, by your imagination once you’re doing things. I mean, everything I’m doing could be written in a word problem in a math textbook, and there’s definitely practical value to that, obviously students need to be able to work through that, but you’re really kind of limited to, Susie had a plant that was six inches tall or whatever the directions are. But when you’re actually doing things, you’re going to get variables, you’re going to get ideas. Students are going to ask more questions that are going to lead to more interesting learning, and it’s just a lot more memorable for students, and that’s just going to help them transfer what they’re learning to their own situation when they need it.

Dinah: Absolutely. So it’s clear that your program has many elements and obviously has taken time to get to where it is. Do you have any advice for educators who are just starting out as to where they should focus and how they can feel successful and build a program?

Brian: I think I’d probably go with kind of what I was just saying. I think getting outside of the classroom and doing something with students is just going to be time well spent. I mean, obviously if it’s organized and planned, everybody in elementary school gets outside for recess, but being able to do some learning and where teachers are setting, keeping expectations and having learning expectations and behavior expectations and getting outside of their classroom, I think is going to just waken up a whole bunch of students who are, you’re going to see a different side of students’ engagement.

I think in terms of starting a program, I think I was very fortunate that we had such strong administrative support. I haven’t always had that with other things that I’ve done, and I totally understand it’s not always possible, but if you can get students excited about things, our community, the community loves this program. Whenever there’s talk about funding cuts and things like that, I don’t really lose sleep over it because I just know the students are engaged, the students are liking what we’re doing, the parents see that, the administrators see that it’s something that everybody can be proud about. So I think allowing students some time to explore and play and be curious about things with a focus of course, but allowing them to work through that, that just pays off the time is worth it. Although for teachers of my generation, it’s not instinctual to you have to kind of sit back and drink your coffee and make sure the students are doing kind of what you’re expecting them to do, but understanding that it’s going to go maybe in some unexpected directions that are still valuable. And if you can feel comfortable with your administrators and your students doing that, I think it’s a lot of fun. And I think it’s also just much more engaging and memorable for our students.

I’m proud of what we’re doing here and I think our community is proud of what we’re doing here and I love to show people so that other people can get inspired and hopefully more students across New England or are having these kinds of experiences.

Dinah: I would say to people listening to this, if they are in Northfield, New Hampshire going by the Southwick School they should reach out to you and get a tour. It sounds like a really dynamic and exciting program that includes so many facets. So thank you so much for taking time out of your busy teaching day to talk.

Brian: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me and good luck with the podcast. I appreciate it!

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