A Feminist Analysis of Socio-Ecological Intergenerational Learning in a Critical Food Studies Course

• In Event: Critical Approaches to Food Systems Education Part II: Exploring Diverse Feminist Perspectives

Abstract

Environmental education (EE) scholars often view intergenerational learning (learning between and among family members) as a vehicle to influence adult understandings of and relationships with the environment (e.g., Duvall & Zint, 2007). Yet, EE researchers have studied intergenerational learning in a limited fashion, with no emphasis on the role of intergenerational learning in higher education. At commuter campuses like my university, where only 10 percent of students reside in on-campus housing, intergenerational learning might be a salient means of fostering sustainable relationships with the environment, particularly those oriented toward critical understandings of food systems. Many traditional age college students remain with their parents throughout the duration of their education, for example, while non-traditional students have families of their own. The objective of this paper, therefore, is to explore the complex role of intergenerational learning in critical food systems education courses taught at the university level.

To do this, I take inspiration from scholarship in environmental anthropology (Milton, 2002; Neves, 2009), education (Fawcett, 2005; Nxumalo, 2015; Rice, 2013; Rowe, 2011, 2013; Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015), and feminist studies (Grosz, 2011; Harper, 2010, 2012) to theorize socioecological intergenerational learning as an ongoing process of relational becoming, whereby humans negotiate how to develop a more ethical and holistic sense of self through participation in mutable collectivities of living and nonliving entities, which in this case complexly participate in food production and consumption and the making of food waste. This ethical and holistic human self does not serve as the goal or endpoint of socioecological learning but rather continually develops and evolves throughout one’s lifetime and in response to an innumerable number of learning experiences, including those that occur in the affect and emotion-laden routines of daily family life (e.g., Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw; Milton, 2002).

This project draws on two years of multispecies ethnographic research conducted on a critical food studies service-learning course I teach, where I have collected data through the following methods: participant-observation (fieldnotes), post-course ethnographic interviews with students, and student work (ethnographic journals, course assignments). The findings of this research suggest that undergraduate students reflexively engage in socioecological intergenerational learning as they share their course experiences with family members (children, parents, spouses, siblings), or more directly engage family members in the course through including them in field visits to community gardens, petting farms, and/or working polycultural farms. Although in some cases students tried to “convert” their family members (e.g, Breunig, 2013) to new relations with food (e.g., avoiding meat consumption, eating less fats, purchasing foods where workers, who are typically people of color living in poverty, and animals are treated fairly), in many other instances students recognized the complexities and tensions associated with the socio-material-political aspects of their own and their families’ relationships with food. That is, they realized they were unwilling or unable to change behaviors they considered unsustainable, unethical, or inhumane, in part because they found themselves situated within oppressive and complex food systems that personal behavioral changes alone cannot rectify.

Authors

• Teresa Katrina Lloro-Bidart, California State Polytechnic University - Pomona

• Casey Sidwell, California State Polytechnic University - Pomona