Primitive Accumulation, Educational Enclosures, and School Gardens

• In Event: Neoliberalism’s Paradoxical Doxa: “New Imperialism”

Abstract

This paper examines the growing vein of environmental educational research focused on school gardens through the Marxian concepts of primitive accumulation and enclosure. While school garden research emphasizes the development of sustainable gardens on school grounds that can be used as curricular and pedagogical tools, we argue that there are larger structural and historical forces at play in contemporary educational processes that influence the possibility for the success of the school garden movement. Our inquiry into the forms of labor and learning that occur in school gardens is predicated upon a concern for the ways student learning in neoliberal schooling so often reiterates and reinforces the violence of enclosure and primitive accumulation.

Authors

• Clayton Todd Pierce, University of Utah

• Graham Bryan Slater, University of Utah

• Robert Unzueta, University of Utah