Using a Feminist Standpoint Approach to Propagate Formal and Informal Garden Educators' Experiences

• In Event: Critical Approaches to Food Systems Education Part I: Garden and Sustainable Agriculture Education

Abstract

Feminist standpoint theory (e.g. Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Patricia Hill Collins), particularly postmodern standpoint, asserts that individuals have a unique and important perspective based on their situated positionalities and knowledges (Haraway, 1988), (e.g. race, class, gender, education/training, place, experiences). Using feminist standpoint as a methodological approach seeks to allow people from various positionalities —particularly marginalized ones—to be heard.
Garden education has a rich background in EE, and has been conducted across formal spaces such as schools, to informal spaces like community gardens, community-center gardens, and museum-based gardens (e.g. Cutter-McKenzie, 2009; Reis & Ferreira, 2015; Williams & Anderson, 2015). An important aspect of garden education is its ability to serve many different audiences across a multitude of spaces. Each of these spaces and the garden educators who work within them represent different garden-positionalities and different ways of using, viewing, and working with the garden as an educational tool.
The project detailed in this paper is a collaboration between a local non-profit which supports school gardens, myself—a university-based education researcher/teacher educator, and a group of local elementary and middle school teachers. The project aim is to establish and support a network of local K-8 teachers who use school gardens to teach science concepts and inquiry. We began the collaboration with an intensive week in the summer of 2016 which brought together twelve local K-8 teachers, the non-profit’s staff, and the education researcher. The collaboration extended across the 2016-17 school year as teachers designed, implemented, and refined garden lessons and units with support from non-profit staff and the researcher.
What emerged as a result of our combined work together is the uniqueness of each participants’ positions within their schools or organization, and how this impacted what and how they elected to teach using school gardens, and whom they taught. Several of the teachers participating in the collective already had extensive experience with school gardens, others were in their first several years or just embarking on garden-based education. In working with these educators, it has become evident that they all have rich, multi-faceted stories surrounding their work with students in school gardens.
To date, research about garden education has typically been told from the researcher perspective with teachers and/or garden educators as objects of study (e.g. Blair, 2009; Williams & Dixon, 2013). As a researcher, I am exploring how a feminist standpoint approach can allow teachers and/or garden educators to author and tell their own stories, from their varied positionalities. I argue that this multi-voiced narrative speaks to the multi-audiences interested in and involved in garden-based education. As part of this work, the teachers and garden educators engaged in the garden collective are authoring vignettes about their experiences. As a researcher, I am supporting their writing, and compiling their writings into an edited book for the garden education community. This paper will explore the methodological approach underlying this endeavor.

Author

• Sarah Riggs Stapleton, University of Oregon