Reviving a Forsaken Entrepot Using Integrated School Gardening

Abstract

This chapter presents success stories from an integrated school gardening undertaken in a community school at an old Newari settlement- Dapcha. These stories depict how once a bustling commercial hub and a historic trade route located high in the hillsides have been set in a state of revival while the authors worked with co-researchers for more than a year. The chapter reflects the research journey of the first author while pursuing the Masters of Philosophy (MPhil) program made possible with concomitant support from the NORHED ‘Rupantaran' project. While working on valuing tenets of participatory action research, school gardening was discovered as an evolving pedagogical model as this contributed primarily to curriculum contextualization, and also realized its potential to revive the region's social, ecological, and economic aspects. In a bigger picture, stories evolved considering ecological sanitation (eco-san) based school gardening as roots while shooting up into multiple facets of entrepreneurism under an integrated school gardening project, as a promising pedagogical model.