Enclosures and Betterment: Lessons From School Gardens and Prison Farms for Arts-Based Eco-Justice Prison Education

• In Event: Poster Session 18
  In Poster Session: Lessons From Outdoor and Garden-Based Learning

Abstract

Enclosures and ideologies of betterment are at the unsettling heart of many gardening practices, which raises difficult questions for environmental education in both school gardens and prison farms or other land-based environmental education in prisons. This presentation considers the following question: How might environmental educators and researchers respond to historical and contemporary lessons from school gardens and prison farms for collaborative, arts-based ecojustice education in prisons? Environmental education in prisons is an under-explored area of research, and gardening, farming, and other land-based environmental education and art practices, such as site-specific installation art, may offer generative, though difficult, places for provocative, restorative, and imaginative public pedagogies.

Author

• Julia Kathleen Ostertag, Self-employed