Learning by doing, in a variety of settings, can be helpful for diverse groups of people to find their voice. The work we do provides practical life experience to students of all ages through the assistance of devoted community-building leaders willing to share hands-on experience.
Community Learning: Building a Hoop House
This project sprung from the Beautiful, Bountiful, Burque Grant, focussed on empowering people in the city of Albuquerque to be more connected to their earth and build community around gardening. As a recipient of this amazing opportunity, Elate Mi Lem created an experiential learning experience in September 2022, shared with youth and adults from diverse groups around the city, building a community garden hoop-house. In addition to the learning experience, a tangible tool was created, allowing gardeners to extend the growing season beyond times when the weather will naturally allow for it. Many people from different part of our life came together to create this project, and other than some instructions researched from the NMSU extension service, none of us had done it before. We all put our varying expertise from other experiences together and made some adjustments to this project to fit our local reality. The project was a success and everyone left with some understanding of the basic requirements of what to do when building a hoop-house, learning by doing– the best form of experiential learning. Many more project like this one will be shared on this page soon!
South Valley Academic at Elate Mi Lem Farm (04/20/2023)
The Spring is here and so are the weeds. Students from the South Valley Academic, as apart of their senior graduation project have to do service learning. I was lucking to be connected with some of them and they gave me two hours of help at Elate Mi Lem farm. We pulled some weeds and were able to clear areas to be covered with cover-crops. While working we engaged in meaningful conversations and shared learning with each others. At the end of a hard work, they picked some vegetables from the hoop house. I look forward to have many more schools involve in this types of experiential learning.
Elate Mi Lem 