Several undergraduate courses at Rice offer students the opportunity to learn about the benefits of community gardens and gain hands-on gardening experience.
BIOS 204 Environmental Sustainability: The Design and Practice of Community Agriculture
Instructor: Joe Novak
BIOS 204 introduces students to the fundamentals of urban agriculture, with an emphasis on community gardening and the use of organic gardening techniques. Weekly lectures involve discussions of crop production practices, community gardening, and urban agriculture. For the lab portion of the course, students participate in managing the Betty and Jacob Friedman Holistic Garden and assist with various garden-related activities.
BIOS 207 Garden Science
Instructor: Joe Novak
BIOS 207 is a 3 credit course which introduces the fundamentals of garden science with emphasis on organic gardening techniques and on the garden as an ecosystem. Lectures will discuss plant systematics, morphology and physiology; factors in the plant’s environment that
affect growth; crop production practices and the common food and ornamental crops. Lab activities will include propagating, growing and using garden crops, soil management, composting, pest and beneficial insect management and maintaining the pollinators garden and
other natural and cultivated areas of the Betty and Jacob Friedman Holistic Garden.
Course Trips to the Garden
Many Rice courses have incorporated visits to the Holistic Garden into their syllabi. The Garden has hosted students from courses in the Natural Sciences, Humanities, Social Sciences, Engineering, and the Program in Writing and Communication, including the following:
- ENST 100: Environment, Culture & Society
- EEPS/BIOS 495: Environmental Science
- ENST 205: Reckoning with the Anthropocene
- ENST 210: Sustainable Futures
- ENST 301: Environmental Justice
- ENST 312: Justice in the Food System
- ENST 422: EcoStudio
- HEAL 498: Public Health Nutrition
- FWIS 100: Introduction to Academic Writing
- FWIS 114: Waste, Trash, Pollution
- FWIS 141: Literature and Environment
- FWIS 145: Food and Environmental Justice
- FWIS 152: The Science of Supplements
- FWIS 174: Sounding the City
- FWIS 175: Surveillance, Security, and Society
- ENGL 310: Nonfiction Nature Writing
- ENGL/ENST 368: Literature and the Environment
- ENGI 120: Introduction to Engineering
- FOTO 206: Photography II