GROW Learning Gardens is an innovative educational initiative founded by Dan Goustan Bodin, a landscape architect and permaculture designer passionate about supporting urban biodiversity. Our team of bilingual Thai-English facilitators are trained in child safeguarding and dedicated to helping children connect with nature through experiential learning.
Core Values: Connect, Learn, Evolve, Together.
We humans live on a wide, beautiful and bountiful planet. Earth is the only place where Life exists in the Universe. Children in the city live in a world built by humans, for humans, for functionality. In Bangkok, there are very few places where Nature still exists, very few children even have access to gardens, and most of these gardens are manicured, sterile, untouchable.
That's why I created Grow after my children were born: to offer children the chance to experience Nature with all their senses, get them to feel, see, and understand the big picture of the world around us: trees, the sky, birds, rain, soil, bees, ecosystems, healthy food...
Humanity will not survive if we don't re-learn how to live a better relationship with Nature. Can we give children a chance to care?
The first condition that opens the doors to everything else is to feel safe: we follow our own strict Risk Assessment and apply International School guidelines. Children first test us, learn to trust us, and when they feel read, that it's ok to try new things. And it's fun, very exciting!
That's when they really explore the full access we grant them to Nature around us, we can dig, taste wild fruits and even flowers, play with a grasshopper, climb trees, use tools, even try getting a mud bath!
All of this fun comes from what seems like free-play, yet really is a child discovering new situations and possibilities, experimenting those challenges, and growing beyond new boundaries. This is where the learning takes place: the deep sense that it's possible to address and face risk, achieve something that was impossible minutes ago, open minds and hearts to the world all around, and when a teacher brings answers, these answers are understood and applied immediately, and stay forever. Growth.
Children choose what they're going to do and how they're going to do it [within the safe framework we defined for them], and what they can come up with goes well beyond anything we ever expect!
Here are some of the actions we've seen children most intensely engage in: harvest a coconut and drink it fresh, light a fire from a single spark, get in a boat and steer it, use a tool to cut a branch and use a knife to carve something out of that branch, climb a tree to cross a river, assist another child reaching their goal, grind stones in powder to extract colors for painting, forage and make herbal tea, let an ant climb on their finger and bite, plant a tree and garden herbs, catch a wild turtle and then release it, make new friends, build a shelter and make it a home, build a city for ants, forage reeds and weave a basket with them, listen and question to the story of trees, deliberately walk and bathe inside deep mud, deeply focus on a challenging art-work, create their own rules and systems, cook something on a fire and eat it, use hammers to smash something to bits, ...What will your child invent when spending time with us? Which boundaries will they break?
