Assessing the Impact of Parental Involvement on the Scaling of Agricultural Technologies from School Garden to Home Farm through Experiential Learning

Cambodia is a predominantly rural nation with a heavy dependence on agriculture, particularly smallholder rice farming systems. While several sustainable agricultural technologies have been successfully piloted on research stations or with small numbers of early adopters, questions remain on how to extend these technologies to large numbers of resource-poor smallholders. The Scaling Suitable Sustainable Technologies Project (S3-Cambodia) seeks to examine pathways for scaling sustainable intensification (SI) technologies to smallholder farmers. One of the identified pathways to scaling SI is through the education system. Cambodian youth serve as an entry point to extend target technologies to farm families through experiential learning opportunities in schools by establishing “green labs,” featuring school gardens.

This research study seeks to support the desired outcomes of the S3-Cambodia project by assessing Cambodian parental involvement their children’s lives and school activities. While students can serve as agricultural education sources for their homes and communities, there is a need to determine if school-child-parent relationships in Cambodia are strong enough to facilitate this knowledge transfer. Primary data was collected from 178 parents whose children attend three separate high schools in three districts of Cambodia through one-on-one orally conducted surveys. These were supplemented by key informant interviews of selected parents, teachers, and principals at each of the high schools. Results indicate that parents have a strong interest in school garden implementation and activities at their children’s school, with 84% parents interested in visiting a school garden. Additionally, the majority believe that they can learn from their children (65%) and actively discuss with their children about what they are learning at school (72%), indicating a high likelihood of knowledge transfer from a school garden. Yet, parents’ involvement in their children’s schools and lives varies between regions, with the rurality of the households influencing family social ties and parents’ proximity to the school.

Overall, the presence of and differences between parent-child-school relationships in various regions of Cambodia will inform how S3-Cambodia implements and monitors green labs. As such, findings are significant to the objectives of S3-Cambodia and the general body of knowledge on scaling through education.