The Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation is a not-for-profit charity that provides the inspiration, information, professional development and support for educators to deliver pleasurable food education to children in Australia.
What is pleasurable food education?
Pleasurable food education is a fun, hands-on approach to teaching children about fresh, seasonal, delicious food so they can form positive food habits for life.
Delivered through a kitchen garden program, pleasurable food education sees children developing self-confidence, life skills and a healthy relationship with food.
“It gets us ready for our lives!” Student, Elizabeth Downs Primary School, South Australia
Pleasurable food education has an array of health, well-being, education and community benefits, and is designed to achieve long-standing change in the food habits of children and young people.
What is the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Program?
The Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Program teaches children and young people, in primary and secondary schools as well as early childhood services, how to grow, harvest, prepare and share fresh, seasonal, delicious food.
“Each week after kitchen and garden classes, students undertake literacy and numeracy follow-up activities, such as writing procedural texts, writing narratives based in the kitchen or garden, identifying origins of food from around the world and drawing maps of the garden.” Louisa Carey, Program Coordinator, Hallam Primary School, Victoria
The Kitchen Garden Program is designed to be integrated as a whole-school or whole-service approach. Schools and early childhood services can adapt the program to their unique needs and resources, and use it to engage families as well as the broader community beyond the school service gate.
There are countless opportunities to embed pleasurable food education into the curriculum.
Get involved
Start small and grow
Starting a kitchen garden program does not require costly infrastructure. The Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation provides a program framework that is self-paced, easily accessible and adaptable to any school environment, using the resources at hand.
The Foundation team works with teachers to provide support and guidance.
The benefits of a kitchen garden program are enormous, with countless opportunities to reinforce literacy, numeracy and all areas of the curriculum, including cross-curriculum priorities. A kitchen garden program can facilitate learning and development approaches such as STEM, well-being programs and project-based learning.
As well as practical know-how, students learn important life skills such as cooperating, sharing, critical thinking and leadership. The program opens up learning and work pathways, and has been proven to motivate disengaged students. Best of all, staff, children and families love it.
How to join
There are two kitchen garden membership package options available, each providing the tools and guidance to support you, no matter where you are in your kitchen garden journey. Membership provides access to educational resources, professional development and ongoing assistance from the Foundation’s support team; as well as access to the Shared Table – a dedicated online community of educators and extensive resource library. There are even more benefits for those schools wanting to commit to running a best-practice Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Program.
Interested to learn more? Just get in touch!
