What is the Purple Coop?
The Purple Coop was founded in 2022 in Davis, California by Kelly Joseph to provide outdoor learning opportunities and resources for students, parents, and teachers. A passionate gardener and graphic designer with over 14 years of experience, Kelly has spent her professional career working with educators, non-profits, and small businesses to promote ideas of sustainability, natural learning, and environmental stewardship.
​
As an outdoor educator, she is a certified Life Lab educator and coordinates the school garden at Pioneer Elementary. For the last two years, she has written lessons, coordinated volunteers, and hosted fundraisers and community service weeks to support the garden program.
The core ideas at the heart of The Purple Coop:
The garden is an art studio, a teaching classroom, a history museum, and a living laboratory for every student to grow and connect with the world around them.
Fall in love with the earth.
This generation of students will inherit a world affected by the dire consequences of climate change. But before we ask them to take on these challenges, we must create opportunities for joy, wonder, and humility in nature. When we love something, we respect it, we cherish it, and we find ways to keep it safe from harm. Fostering this love now will create a lasting connection to the planet we share.
Fail well, fail often.
Avoiding mistakes can be devastating to our growth. Anxiety can shut down our willingness to explore, problem solve, and take risks. In art and with gardening, there is no success without failure. It is in our plants dying that we ask the most questions. It is in struggling to bring an idea to life that we experiment with new ideas and gain new insights. Failing well means we see everything as a lesson -- a clue to interpret as we strive for bigger ideas.
Get your hands dirty.
There is no substitute for digging your hands into rich soil, mixing your fingers into blobs of paint, or letting the juice run off your finger tips from a juicy peach. These sensory experiences connect our minds to the world around us and remind us what it means to be alive. When your hands are dirty, you're doing creative work.
Stay outside.
Studies confirm again and again that humans do better outdoors. Not only do we learn better, but we also breathe better, think better, and have more energy. Students with outdoor learning opportunities have stickier memories too, remembering the lesson material with more clarity and deeper connection than they would in a traditional classroom.
Embrace Diversity.
Nature shows us that diversity is the key to creating a healthy ecosystem. In the garden, this means thoughtfully inter-planting species to provide natural protection and minimize disease. It also means planting new varieties and heirloom cultivars that provide a range of flavors and nutrients. As people, diversity means inviting all cultures, races, gender expressions, learning styles, ages, abilities, and perspectives to participate in order to create a richer, more resilient community.
Include everyone.
Challenging our own implicit biases can feel uncomfortable, but we should do it anyway. The students and volunteers in our classroom have different experiences, languages, and cultures that shape their learning and growth. We don't assume everyone speaks the same language or learns the same way, by incorporating teaching techniques that encourage all voices to share.
Give back to your community.
Empower kids to direct their own learning.
None of us exists in a world unto ourselves, we are all part of a bigger community. Students in the garden learn that our individual actions can combine to benefit all of us. We prioritize community service, volunteerism, and advocacy work. We also value local partnerships with farmers, educators, non-profits and others who help us build a better world.
We emphasize that kids should get to have an active role in shaping the tasks of the day. Sometimes that means shifting gears to follow where the curiosity leads. Sometimes it means slowing down and simplifying our goals for the day. The adults help facilitate conversation and cooperation.
Don't take yourself too seriously.
The garden is a science lab, but it's also a place of whimsy and joy. Art can be precise and articulate, or it can be messy and silly. Studies confirm what many teachers have known for a long time, that great learning can have a lasting impact when it's connected to play.