Roots, Research, Resistance: Constructing Knowledge and Agency in an Urban Gardening Program

• In Event: Creating Spaces for Critical Praxis, Agency, and Empowerment in Formal and Informal Learning Environments

Abstract

Concerns raised by international inquiry around the impacts of human activity on the Earth’s ecosystems have circulated for decades, bringing attention to threats to the habitability of local environments and to the security of essential resources. Public school curricula, meanwhile, increasingly tailored to standardized tests, offer few opportunities for youth to experience and understand the natural world or to connect their studies to their lives or local contexts. Gruenewald (2003) argues that the powerful critical potential of environmental education has been blunted by its institutionalization within educational systems and suggests that the disconnect between schools and curricula and the lives of students creates impediments to the type of transformative environmental education needed to address global social and ecological crises.

Chawla and Flanders Cushing (2007) have synthesized research on the development of “strategic environmental behaviors,” pointing to the need for environmental education that leads not merely to development of specific, predetermined prosocial behaviors but to environmental “action competence.” A disposition encompassing democratic values such as autonomy and collectivist political consciousness, action competence develops through practice of skills that produce meaningful impacts around issues of personal importance, in conjunction with effective mentors and modelling. These help learners develop “resolve” that leads them to establish and pursue their own environmental action goals, as opposed to internalizing a “green” curriculum that prescribes a specific environmental approach (La Paperson, 2014).

The focus of this poster is a seven week, garden-based summer program emphasizing place-centered inquiry around food systems, resource access, consumer culture, and community. Students were introduced to an ecological justice framework that they used to explore their own communities in connection to larger, global issues, develop agency around those that excited their interest, and create culminating action research projects. Data sources include field notes, audio and video recordings of class discussions, and final projects. Small groups of youth participants, peer mentors, teachers, and researchers analysed the data to understand how participants relate and extend concepts and content introduced in the program to produce questions, ideas and plans relevant to them, their families and their communities. The data collection and analysis is iterative and ongoing, using a grounded theory approach (Charmaz 2011) by youth and adult researchers to identify themes related to students’ lived experience and communities. Some initial themes include intergenerational food security and access; sharing information generated in the program with various audiences; and ways that youth voices can better inform civic conversation and influence public policy.

The poster demonstrates ways in which students’ action-research projects represent their lived experience and immediate environmental concerns. It reflects how these young people envision themselves as researchers, educators and change-agents. Analysis of these projects connects and expands the literature on 1. Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), which privileges youth voice and develops youth agency, and 2. Public scholarship, which fosters dialogue between researchers/institutions and communities to co-produce relevant knowledge--as they inform the discussion on environmental education.

Author

• Pieranna Pieroni, City University of New York