Top of the Class

Life Lab's Executive Director Gail Harlamoff was recently interviewed for the following cover story of the GoodTimes.

Top of the Class: Five UC Santa Cruz innovators break the creative mold with projects destined to make a positive difference...Harlamoff dedicates herself to teaching people how to garden. A former fifth-grade science teacher, Harlamoff became disillusioned with the test-and textbook-driven method of teaching science. That all changed after her first Life Lab teachers workshop, where teachers are trained to use garden-based learning to teach science.

“I became a believer immediately,” she remembers. “To me, science in this particular way of teaching is the great equalizer, because kids that may not excel in other areas would sometimes become the experts.”

Life Lab Science Program is neither run nor funded by the university. Rather, its affiliation with UCSC is more like a symbiotic relationship between two entities with similar values: the program, which turned 30 in 2009, started renting a plot adjacent to the UCSC farm on the school’s property in the early 1990s. More than 15,000 people visit its Garden Classroom each year on field trips, and it has around 30 UCSC students as interns at any given time...