2. CHANGING VALUES FOR SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY LANDSCAPES
The changing nature of childhood, approaches to curriculum and learning, and community use of schools raise multiple values in transforming school sites from simply parking and play fields into engaging landscapes. Given mounting concerns about children's reduced ability to experience nature and their community in their daily life, school environments hold great potentials to offer such experiences. As an extension of the classroom, the school site can be used in varied studies for applied, active learning. A recent national study indicates that learning through the local environment enhances student performance and attitudes. The environment serves as an integrating context for learning and engages multiple intelligences. Similarly, as both children and the community use schools more extensively for before- and after-school activities, enriched school landscapes can welcome community life as well as foster informal learning. This section discusses these issues, and offers examples of innovative policies, programs, and partnerships that are transforming school landscapes into learning environments.
2.1 Childhood's Lost Experiences and Their Meanings
The rapid urbanization of land, combined with technological and societal changes, have created tremendous shifts in children's everyday lives. Within our own lifetime, dramatic changes are apparent. Consider how beloved childhood places and times differ from children you know today. The back woods have been cleared for houses, corner stores are replaced by shopping malls, and the freedom of getting around on a bicycle is questionable on today's busy arterial roadways. Television and computers occupy free time previously spent exploring outdoors.
How do the experiences of today's children shape their development and their understandings of natural and cultural surroundings? Children’s everyday places and activities affect not only their intellectual understandings, but also their development in other ways - physical, emotional, social, and spiritual. Kevin Lynch noted, “In childhood we form deep attachments to the location in which we grew up and carry the image of this place with us for the remainder of our lives” (1984, p. 825). Such formative, multi-dimensional experiences require open-ended time, easy access, and suitable places (figure 3).
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figure 3 This courtyard, with its manipulable gravel surface, enables the creation of imaginary worlds as well as informal interactions with community members. photo by: author |
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2.1.1 Diminishing time, access, and place for childhood
Educator David Orr applies the term "ecological literacy" to understanding relationships within the natural world and human actions in it (1992, pp. 85-87). To be literate in a language, one needs to use it, everyday, in a variety of contexts. The opportunities for today's children to develop literacy in their natural and cultural communities are impoverished in each respect. Reduced time to explore one's surroundings, reduced accessibility, and diminished quality of both civic and natural contexts create conditions where the meanings of community in an ecologic, or relational, sense seem hollow.
Children's lives are not immune to the fast pace of our urbanized society. Their time is increasingly consumed by predetermined and supervised activities. The New York Times (November 1998) published findings of a University of Michigan 1998 study of children 13 years old and younger that compared its results with a similar 1981 study:
"Increasingly rare are the days when children had the time and ability to organize their own games of marbles, stickball, or cops and robbers. In their place are more time doing homework, more time running around with parents doing errands and more time participating in organized sports like soccer." (S. Holmes, p. A18).
In schools across the United States, classwork or structured activities are replacing recess. In Atlanta, this approach resulted in the construction of a school without a playground (Johnson 1998). Child development experts decry these changes, and "insist that free time and unstructured play are vital for intellectual and emotional growth, as well as skills of negotiating and cooperating" (Johnson 1998, p. A1). The elimination of recess also runs counter to addressing physical development concerns of obesity and other disorders linked to restlessness.
Changes in how time is spent contribute to children's access to their community, yet other factors also are limiting their connections. Researcher Sanford Gaster states "That children and youths in cities around the world are increasingly cut off from safely using and enjoying their neighborhoods has been asserted and studied for at least 2 decades. Factors. . . include increasing street crime and automobile traffic, and through vandalism or municipal neglect or mismanagement, the deterioration or destruction of parks, playgrounds, and schoolyards" (1991, p. 70).
Current patterns and scales of urbanization also reduce children's access to nature. Educator Clare Cooper Marcus notes that many college students, when asked to describe a favorite childhood place, "recall a wild or leftover place, a place that was never specifically 'designed.'" (1986, p. 124). Through creative play and exploration, these places were experienced and given meaning through a narrative developed by the child. Yet, as David Orr notes, such self-informed narratives are increasingly rare:
"Ecological literacy is becoming more difficult, I believe, not because there are fewer books about nature, but because there is less opportunity for the direct experience of it. . . . A sense of place requires more direct contact with the natural aspects of a place, with soils, landscape, and wildlife. This sense is lost as we move down the continuum toward the totalized urban environment where nature exists in tiny, isolated fragments by permission only" (1992, pp. 88-89).
Orr's concerns are echoed by Gary Paul Nabhan and Stephen Trimble in The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places (1994). Nabhan applies Robert Michael Pyle's term "extinction of experience" to describe the loss of knowledge about nature through direct experience and storytelling. Pyle used this term to illustrate children's loss of frequent contact with wildlife, which Nabhan found occuring even among rural children in the desert Southwest. In a 1992 study of 52 children, "the vast majority of children we interviewed were now gaining most of their knowledge about other organisms vicariously" (1994, p. 87). Nabhan related this with a national survey of fifth and sixth graders, "in which 53 percent of the children listed the media as their primary teacher about the environment; 31 percent reported that they learned more about the environment from school, and only 9 per cent claimed they obtained most of their environmental information at home and in the wild" (1994, p. 88).
2.1.2 Developing self: mind, body, and spirit
In addition to inspiring intellectual development, contact with nature also enriches the body and spirit. In the 19th century, Frederick Law Olmsted conceived of urban parks as oases from harsh urban conditions for physical and social recreation. Today, the extensive research of environmental psychologists Stephen and Rachel Kaplan shows that people prefer natural environments and that nature provides a myriad of personal benefits. The restorative qualities of natural environments are generating renewed attention in designing health care facilities with therapeutic landscapes. Registered nurse/landscape architect Nancy Gerlach-Spriggs writes: "We feel renewed when we spend any time in nature, and in that sense, any garden can revive or rehabilitate us" (1999, p. 134).
For children, time to be in nature offers unique benefits to their cognitive, physical, emotional, and social development. An extensive study by LTL of children's perceptions of their school grounds showed that children find symbolic values in natural elements, and these elements inspired creative play (Titman 1994). Another LTL study of 400 schools indicated numerous benefits of well-designed grounds, including "the development of physical skills, the building of confidence through exploration of the environment and the acquisition of social and behavioural skills through learning to participate and share with others" (Stoneham 1997, p. 24). Robin Moore and Herb Wong identify similar values (1998) in the transformation of a Berkeley school from asphalt to a diverse natural setting (see Section 3).
The growing limitations of our current society hold troubling future consequences, since how children develop personal attachments to their natural and cultural communities impacts their understandings and efforts to sustain these communities. Yet as central places in children's daily lives, school environments remain immediate, and largely untapped, resources for self-directed experiences of nature and community. Additionally, school landscapes may serve as valuable tools in formal education.
2.2 Alternative Learning Approaches and the Role of Landscapes
Experience-based learning, relating to Sfard's participation metaphor of learning, is gaining renewed attention in education. The noted early twentieth century educator and philosopher John Dewey called for making curriculum meaningful through the child's environment and experiences. Current research supports Dewey's theories, in applying curricula to real world situations. This concept is rooted in many approaches, including "authentic," experiential, hands on, applied, and expeditionary learning. Each suggests a potentially powerful role for the outdoor environment. Approaches grounded in child-centered experience and exploration, such as those embodied in Montessori or Reggio Emilia schools, offer vibrant examples of children engaged in learning through their environments. Recent U.S. initiatives also confirm the values of experience-based learning.
2.2.1 Redefining intelligence, experiential learning approaches, and findings
The recognition that people learn in different ways is central to Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. He initially identified seven intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. His recent book, Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century, adds an eighth, naturalist intelligence, which is explored in reference to his framing of intelligence as "a biopsychological potential to process information that can be activated in a cultural setting to solve problems or create products that are of value in a culture" (1999, pp. 33-34).
Gardner believes we each possess a unique, and developing, set of intelligences. He presents a compelling argument for educational processes that introduce material and build understanding through multiple approaches, and describes such approaches to engage students in a particular topic. These approaches generally draw upon specific intelligences. Of particular relevance to the development of outdoor learning environments is his "hands on" approach. Gardner notes that children especially engage with a topic through activities "where they can build something, manipulate materials, or carry out experiments (1999, p. 171)."
Multiple Intelligence (MI) theory has been used to structure school curricula with positive results. Gardner describes the results of Harvard's Project Zero research in forty-one U.S. schools which applied the theory for at least three years: "78 percent of the schools reported positive standardized test outcomes, with 63 percent of these attributing the improvement to practices inspired by MI theory. Seventy-eight percent reported improved performances by students with learning difficulties. . . . and 81 percent reported improved student discipline with 67 percent of these attributing the improvement to MI theory (1999, p. 113)."
Improvements to student test scores and attitudes have also been attributed to an educational approach that uses the "environment as an integrating context (EIC)" for learning. The State Education and Environment Roundtable (SEER), an assembly of representatives from 12 state education agencies, defined the term in a study of environment-based education programs in 40 U.S. schools. EIC learning is "a framework for interdisciplinary, collaborative, student-centered, hands-on, and engaged learning," that uses "a school's surroundings and community as a framework within which students can construct their own learning, guided by teachers and administrators using proven educational practices" (Lieberman and Hoody 1998, p. 1).
The report details results of comparative analyses of EIC and traditional students as well as of surveys, interviews, and other measures, and found:
"EIC appears to significantly improve student performance in reading, writing, math, science and social studies, and enriches the overall school experience. Students exposed to programs using EIC approaches often become enthusiastic, self-motivated learners. In addition to traditional subject-matter knowledge and basic life skills, EIC students gain a wealth of added educational benefits, including: a comprehensive understanding of the world; advanced thinking skills leading to discovery and real-world problem-solving; and awareness and appreciation of the diversity of viewpoints within a democratic society" (p. 2).
Another coalition, New American Schools, is implementing alternative school models to improve student learning. One is called Expeditionary Learning, an approach drawing from the principles and values of Outward Bound. Students collaborate on multi-disciplinary, project-based learning expeditions, which involve intellectual, service and physical qualities. One of its ten design principles, "The Natural World," integrates the landscape as both a stage for self-discovery and as a text with its own lessons. Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound is used in 65 U.S. schools, and independent studies of schools implementing this approach reveal improved student achievement and greater student and teacher motivation (http://www.elob.org).
Research on how the brain works also supports the learning potentials of these experiential approaches, as noted in an article on innovative school design:
"Researchers now know that while people are born with a fixed number of brain cells, the synapses - or connections - between those neurons multiply in response to new experiences, particularly in childhood. Learning occurs when fresh synapses sprout, or when existing connections are modified in response to new information. . . . Learning by doing rather than merely by listening to lectures or watching demonstrations - appears to build these synapse networks most effectively because it engages all the senses" (Carrns 1997, p. B1, B12).
The nonprofit organization, Second Nature, offers another validation in its support of. experiential learning in higher education that relates to institutions' campuses and surrounding communities. Second Nature's vision statement notes: "Educational psychologists tell us that we retain 80 percent of what we do as opposed to 10-20 percent of what we hear and read." If this is true, then outdoor places that enable sensory rich, experiential learning should serve as essential resources for all schools and curricula (and may you retain 10-20 percent of this paper!).
2.2.2 Environmental education and school landscapes
David Orr states that "all education is environmental education. By what is included or excluded, emphasized or ignored, students learn that they are a part of or apart from the natural world" (1992, p. 90). In the US, thirty states require environmental education in their curriculum (D. Holmes 1998). While trips to environmental education centers may expose children to inspiring natural systems, such experiences are often disconnected with the natural environments and processes found in their immediate, everyday settings. Making connections requires not only committed teaching approaches, but also enriching places that are literally just outside. As a curriculum component, then, environmental education should influence the development of school sites as places for learning.
To have authentic value, children's understandings of place must emerge from sensory-rich experiences. Rachel Carson observed the importance of such experiences:
"If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil. Once the emotions have been aroused - a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love - then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning." (1956, p. 45).
David Sobel, in his book Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education, presents an educational approach that relates children's developmental stages to their evolving relationships with nature. He notes that "formative years of bonding with the earth include three stages of development. . . early childhood from ages four to seven, the elementary years from eight to eleven, and early adolescence from twelve to fifteen" (1996, p. 11). Sobel has collected and analyzed neighborhood maps drawn by children of varied cultures, interviewed and toured with them. Distinctive features within these groups ground his educational recommendations:
• early childhood - focus on building empathy with nature, particularly animals. Sobel describes the affinity young children have for animals, which can build strong emotional bonds, as well as engage imagination and role-playing.
• elementary school years - exploration of the landscape is key. Given this group's fascination with what lies beyond their familiar range, Sobel describes field studies of streams or watersheds that link the experience of a local place with expanding scales and processes.
• early adolescents - social relationships are essential, and can galvanize social action . In this stage leading to adulthood, adolescents need to realize their potentials to interact with and affect their society.
While relating to specific ages, Sobel states the proposed techniques are not mutually exclusive. Yet in drawing from children's developmental stages, his approach also suggests what landscape qualities are needed to facilitate learning.
In Natural Learning, Robin Moore and Herb Wong describe three "domains of education" (1997, p. 195-6) that should be supported in the design of school landscapes:
• informal education - encompasses all learning from a child's daily experiences, of which play is a central quality.
• formal education - characterized as the familiar context of a teacher presenting material to children in a class context.
• nonformal education - defined as a bridge between these two forms, where resource people may facilitate learning in non-classroom settings, such as natural areas and community facilities.
Education outdoors can draw from a host of pedagogies and goals, ranging from conservation education to civic responsibility. Whether encountered through informal play, nonformal activities, formal instruction - or preferably a combination all three - school landscapes are immediately accessible and available places for learning. The research of alternative learning approaches suggests that these landscapes are most meaningful if they provide varied hands-on, interactive opportunities to experience the nature and cultures of one's immediate and larger community (figure 4). These qualities are discussed in greater detail in Section 3.
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figure 4 A student examines a fern growing in his school's urban forest. photo by: Dale Lang |
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2. 3 The Need for a Modern Red School House
Schools historically were centers of community life, a role embodied in the icon of the "little red school house." As school design has become more a series of formulas and facilities specifications, the resulting schools have become less connected with the life of their communities. A contemporary icon of schools may be represented as a one-story building isolated from the community by chain link fence and acres of grass. Yet economic, social and political conditions - including fiscal efficiencies, life-long learning programs, community revitalization, and innovative teaching and leadership - are fostering new relationships among schools and their surrounding communities. These relationships create a dialogue where student learning occurs in the community and the community extends into the school.
Learning that occurs in a community context gives students unique skill-building opportunities. Educator John Abbott observes that the community is a critical setting to build essential competencies: "the ability to synthesize, to solve problems, to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty, and especially, to be creative and personally enterprising" (1995, p. 8). He notes that while the old competencies of "numeracy, literacy, and an ability to communicate" can be taught in a classroom, these newer ones cannot.
In Schools that Work: America's Most Innovative Public Education Programs, George H. Wood demonstrates the values of community-based learning. Wood notes that when students learn in their community, they learn skills as well as learn that their actions can make a difference. Wood provides vivid examples of the opportunities and challenges of using "the community as a classroom." He describes an elementary school teacher taking her class on walks each week and integrating their experiences and found objects in curricula. He traces the changes at a high school where administration planned to drain a marsh for athletic fields. A teacher who used the marsh for classes opposed the plans, and as the debate mounted, current and former students joined in. Students organized petitions, reported progress in their school newspaper, and painted a mural to highlight the cause. Once the decision not to drain the marsh was achieved, students and local scouts planted the area and the district funded a plan to develop it as a nature study area. Additionally, the student activism formalized into "Students for a Better Environment," a group that has effectively taken on other environmental challenges in the larger community.
While communities become a part of school learning environments, there is growing momentum to again make schools centers of the community. Community educators work towards "lighted schoolhouses" - schools open beyond the normal class day for other learning programs, recreation and social activities that serve the surrounding community and its needs (Decker and Boo). Missouri's statewide Caring Communities program provides such opportunities, which the Independence School District has applied to serve family and community needs, such as: full-day childcare; after hours sports, classes, and meetings; and libraries and media centers open at night for all to use. The district provides referral services for children's needs, and has on-site health clinics for students and parents at two of its elementary schools (Umansky 1999).
To initiate a "national conversation" on how to involve parents and other community members in building schools and how to make schools centers of the community, the U.S. Department of Education hosted a National Symposium on School Design in October 1998. Prior to the symposium, school and design professionals developed six principles. These principles address both the nature and process of schools as learning environments:
"1. Enhance teaching and learning and accommodate the needs of all learners....
2. Serve as the center of the community....
3. Result from a planning/design process involving all stakeholders....
4. Provide for health, safety and security....
5. Make effective use of all available resources....
6. Allow for flexibility and adaptability to changing needs" (1999).
As the roles of community and school overlap to create what is widely being called "a community of learners," opportunities emerge for enriching school sites and surroundings. Innovative partnerships can enhance the qualities, use, and care of school landscapes, as described below.
While often begun by a dedicated, visionary individual, the transformation of school sites into ecologically rich learning environments requires broad-based and ongoing support. Policies across jurisdictions and at several levels must foster, expand, and sustain such efforts. Innovative funding and curriculum programs must provide tools for transforming and using the site. An inclusive process that fosters creative partnerships among all stakeholders - students, teachers, staff, administration, parents, neighborhoods, and community organizations and agencies - is key.
The following three examples describe innovative policies, programs, and partnerships. While unique in conception and realization, they share common features, including:
• leadership from a respected and committed individual and group;
• creative partnering of people, resources, and ideas;
• multiple benefits valued by a spectrum of stakeholders;
• perseverance to refine and realize goals; and
• policy-based, financial, and/or material support from school, community, and non-profit institutions and individuals to initiate and sustain the vision.
2.4.1 The Edible Schoolyard, Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, Berkeley, CA
The Edible Schoolyard is an excellent example of a concerned entrepreneur's partnering with a school to transform its landscape, integrate experiences with curriculum, and generate support for similar initiatives at other schools. A once unused acre of asphalt at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California, now flourishes with organic fruits and vegetables that enrich the minds and bodies of some 900 students (Urban Ecologist 1998, Kligman 1998). This happened because Chez Panisse restaurateur Alice Waters passed the school each day and was dismayed by its derelict condition. After reading about her concerns in a newspaper article, the school's principal contacted her. A lunch meeting followed that led to an expanding partnership and program, The Edible Schoolyard.
The transformation began with a planning charrette in early 1995, which included landscape architects, teachers, and food growers (Comnes 1999). Waters obtained support from the Center for Ecoliteracy and Senator Barbara Boxer, set up a business plan, and renovated the school's unused kitchen. The asphalt was removed, and a planting celebration occurred in December 1995. The garden's first harvest took place in 1996, with a garden coordinator overseeing volunteers and students. In the spring of 1997, a chef was hired to teach students cooking. The Edible Schoolyard has become an exciting attraction for students, all of whom take part in its care (figure 5). Along with vegetable beds and orchard, the garden contains a rock creek, kiwi vine gazebo, adobe bread oven, and compost system. Teachers are using the garden experiences for an ecological curriculum revolving around math and science classes, while the cooking lessons are linked with humanities, math and science. Staff and community volunteers work with students in maintaining the garden.
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figure 5 In the Edible Schoolyard, student experiences in cycles of gardening are integrated with curricula. photo by: Ene Osteraas-Constable, The Edible Schoolyard |
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Envisioned by Waters as a national model for a holistic curriculum and physical environment that engages children, teachers, and community members, the Edible Schoolyard has resulted in other initiatives. In 1996, Waters established the Chez Panisse Foundation to raise awareness and funding for this and similar projects that "teach sustainability, strengthen community, and develop responsible stewards of the land through the sensual experiences of gardening, cooking, and sharing food" (1997 Annual Report). And the success of the Edible Schoolyard has influenced institutional policy to expand the program. In the fall of 1999, the Berkeley school board "unanimously passed a resolution that provides all children in the district with access to organic food in their lunch programs; and that every new school be built with a kitchen and a garden" (Knickerbocker 1999, p. 29). By the year 2000, 12 of Berkeley's 17 schools have established gardens (Green 2000).
2.4.2 The Boston Schoolyard Initiative
The Boston Schoolyard Initiative, an innovative six-year partnership between the City of Boston and a collaborative of 11 local foundations, is revitalizing neglected schoolyards and their surrounding communities. Kirk Meyer, director of the Boston Schoolyard Funders Collaborative, writes that this Initiative "is a model for promoting community-driven sustainable development, environmental stewardship, responsible public policy, and outdoor experiential education in the Boston Public Schools." (1998, p. 8). By the end of its fifth year, the program was working with 56 of Boston's 128 schools, and plans to assist more in the coming years (Meyer 2000).
School improvements are envisioned and undertaken using the following inclusive process. A school applies for an organizing and planning grant from the Collaborative. This grant is used to hire a community organizer who forms a stakeholder group through outreach to school constituents, neighbors, and community groups. The City provides $2 million each year for the program's schoolyard design and development budget. A project manager from the City's Department of Neighborhood Development assists each school stakeholder group in selecting and working with a landscape architect for a schoolyard masterplan. Through a series of meetings, the landscape architect identifies key issues for the school and its surrounding neighborhood, develops a series of alternative schematics for review, and forges a single masterplan. The schoolyard group then prioritizes features of the masterplan to fit their construction budget.
One of the challenges renewed schoolgrounds face is adequate ongoing maintenance. The School Department and local schoolyard “Friends” groups have jointly developed a maintenance protocol. The Collaborative has established small matching grants to school site councils as "maintenance sustainability awards" and pilot grants to local community development corporations to develop schoolyard sustainability strategies. Partnering multiple constituents for extensive schoolyard use also is intended to foster a "friends of the schoolyard" group to assist with maintenance (figure 6).
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figure 6 A garden created on part of an East Boston elementary school is tended by neighborhood children through a summer program with Boston Urban Gardeners. photo by: Kirk Meyer, director, Boston Schoolyard Funders Collaborative |
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The learning potentials of these schoolyards have been strengthened through teacher training and curriculum development. The Boston Recycling Office offers workshops for teachers on schoolyard composting. The Collaborative provides professional development grants to teams of teachers, stipulating they share their experiences with others. The Collaborative seeks to incorporate outdoor learning as part of the curriculum at School Department's official center for teacher training.
2.4.3 Seattle's Grey to Green Program
Seattle's Grey to Green Program was created in 1999 to help the city's schools and surrounding neighborhoods redevelop school grounds for both school and community benefits. Agency partners are the city's Department of Parks and Recreation, Department of Neighborhoods, and Seattle School District, with funding and coordination through Parks. The program has an $800,000 budget for its first two years, with school/community applicants receiving up to $70,000 as a match for community-based contributions and volunteer time (Dane 2000).
The Grey to Green Program is designed to complement existing School District and Department of Neighborhoods programs, and foster school and neighborhood partnerships in all phases. An interested group must contact the School District's Self-Help Program to initiate the process. Funding for conceptual designs and other costs may be obtained through the Department of Neighborhood's matching fund program, which matches community-raised donations or services. When a conceptual design is developed, groups may apply for funds from the Grey to Green program. Eligible projects include new or improved play areas, learning gardens, habitat restoration and preservation, or active recreational opportunities. Selection criteria include:
• demonstrated support from school and community constituents,
• a community or neighborhood match of donations or service,
• a long term benefit to the school and community,
• a developed design that has been reviewed by the School District, and
• a plan for ongoing maintenance (City of Seattle, Department of Parks and Recreation 1999).
The first awards were made in 2000, and five schools have program-supported construction projects underway or completed that demonstrate a range of improvements (Dane 2000). One school, T.T. Minor Elementary, is creating children's learning gardens (see Section 5.1). Another, Dearborn Park Elementary, is applying program funds to wetland restoration and a boardwalk (see Section 5.2). A third school made improvements to its front entry landscape. The other two awards focus on improved recreational opportunities, with one school developing a grass field and play structure in place of asphalt, and the other providing landscape and play improvements to an asphalt playground. Given the comprehensive scope of collaboration, planning, and matching support required for Grey to Green Program support, both the physical and social community of schools and neighborhoods may be enriched through the process.