In sub-Saharan African (SSA) colonial and postcolonial contexts like rural Tanzania, school gardens/farms have, with very little success, aimed to address school food security for the rural poor by centering on food production. In Tanzania, cultivation played an important role in most rural public schools during colonialism and after independence to supplement school meals, raise revenue, and promote social cohesion (Nyerere, 1967). The problems that these initiatives ran into in Tanzania and SSA in general were racialized colonial policies requiring public schools with African students to produce agricultural goods, the exploitation of students by teachers, insufficient training of teachers in the school subject of agriculture, the inability of such programs to pay for the costs of schooling, and the perception that these programs were detracting from time in schools devoted to national exam preparation and future employment (Desmond, Grieshop, & Subramaniam, 2004; Eisemon, Prouty, & Schwille, 1992; Riedmiller, 2002).Today, school cultivation initiatives are again being re-established in Tanzania as a component of donor-driven efforts to improve teaching and learning and community health (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2004). Over the period of one year in northern Tanzania, 16 different public primary schools with cultivation programs were first visited and comparisons between the programs were made. Then two donor-supported elementary school garden/farm projects were identified in two rural communities in northern Tanzania and a qualitative approach (interviews, field observations, classroom teaching observations, document analysis) was used to examine how these two different school cultivation models shape student learning and respond to local needs. The objectives and structures by which certain aims were intended to be accomplished were analyzed and the factors were detailed for why these objectives of the donors were or were not accomplished. This study also investigated variation in school garden and regular classroom activities to determine what students learn from that experience, how teachers connect school agricultural activities to content learning, and what agricultural knowledge is transferred home by students. In this study, school cultivation programs were also used to learn about the nature of teaching and learning at each school. The diverse views of villagers, teachers, and students in defining a successful school were incorporated to understand their expectations for how primary schools should function in Tanzania as well as the prevailing views and practices for schooling and agriculture and some of the exceptions in light of the major changes that are taking place in East Africa and Tanzania in recent times in relation to rainfall patterns, technology, mass schooling, non-governmental organization involvement, and the expansion of free trade. Finally, the study analyzes the findings of the data in relation to opportunities to learn. It calls for further research to examine school practices and pedagogical methods so that interventions endeavoring to improve educational quality in Tanzania can be implemented to address opportunities for and obstacles to student learning. The findings contribute to an emerging body of literature investigating how school cultivation policy and practice influence student learning and informs other efforts to apply experiential science learning to food-security, agro-ecological practice and community problem-solving.
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