"We Say That Relationships Matter...": Cultivating Ethical Relationships Through Campus Gardening

• In Event: 50.010 - University Learning Gardens: Cultivating the Margins, on Borrowed Land and Time

Abstract

In response to AERA’s call to consider how educational research responds to questions of what and whose knowledge matters in a post-truth era, we share multimodal narratives that draw on arts-based research, narrative inquiry, and auto-ethnography to present two case studies of campus teaching and learning gardens on the traditional and unceded territory of the Algonquin First Nations. The central theoretical exploration will be careful considerations of ethical relationality (Donald, 2012) in the context of claims of truth and reconciliation (whose truth?) and decolonization amidst ongoing settler colonialism, extractivism, and increasing neoliberalism within and beyond the academy (Giroux, 2014; Kuokkanen, 2007; Nxumalo & Cedillo, 2017; Simpson, 2014; Tuck & Yang, 2012).

As white settlers, we recognize that our privileges and positionality shape our interpretations and agency within these campus garden projects, and yet, we both also acknowledge the structural barriers that limit our individual and collective efforts to enact our desired decolonial, anti-oppressive, and land-based pedagogies.

As a precarious contract lecturer within the increasingly neoliberal academy, Author 1’s auto-ethnographic reflections consider struggles to initiate and sustain relationships with the campus garden at an anglophone university in Ontario with the “just-in-time” approaches to employment that characterizes non-tenure track post-secondary teaching. This is particularly challenging in the context of online teaching (Russell, In press), where place-based pedagogies and relationships with students are further fragmented and distanced by the largely text-based interfaces of online teaching platforms. After three years, Author 1 recognizes the impacts of neoliberal, precarious university labour on the ability to create and sustain the nuanced, storied, and activist relationships with places, gardens, and people (on and off campus) that are at the centre of decolonial garden-based pedagogies (Ostertag, Gerofsky & Scott, 2016).

Author 2 brings in a perspective from a francophone college in Quebec where explicitly engaging with decolonial pedagogies at the Jardin Anishinaabeg poses several challenges. Alongside colleagues who have developed relationships with Elders in creating a sacred plants garden, we examine the political and economical imperatives at stake in opening and acknowledging sacred space in educational institutions. Although the relationships develop independently of funding processes, the means to implement, improve, and sustain the garden become gateways to discuss reconciliation and decolonization within the college. This includes a reconsideration of informal and formal hierarchies in college teaching, professional development, and curriculum development.

For land-based social justice educators, particularly those who engage in land-based decolonial pedagogies with gardens, cultivating ethical relationships with people and places are key to shift from hyper-competitive individualism toward the collective approaches required for and created by garden-based pedagogies. While engaging in individual efforts to decolonize our settler pedagogies and relationships with the land remain important, confronting and transforming academic labour conditions, institutional policies, funding formulas, and academic hierarchies that increasingly concentrate authority in the hands of the few (Timmerman, 2018) are significant areas for institutional change and activism required in order to cultivate the ethical relationships necessary for campus learning gardens.

Authors

• Julia Kathleen Ostertag, Independent Scholar

• Julie Vaudrin-Charette, University of Ottawa