Investigating the Social and Environmental Relations of School and Community Gardens

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Experiential Learning With/in the Natural World: (Re)Shaping the Boundaries of Possibility (Table 5)

Abstract

This paper describes and analyzes the social and environmental relations that emerged from an ongoing school and community-based garden project in Montreal. Methodologically and epistemologically, I combine institutional ethnography and visual methodologies to explore and uncover how community gardens, gardening programming and greening can work to produce disproportionate outcomes for learners, educators, community workers and community members. In the process of creating and funding many different gardens in schools, community-based organizations, and gentrifying neighbourhoods, I have elucidated specific institutional contrivances (e.g., funding, policy, geographies of injustice, work processes, discourse, curricular) that are presently structuring and defining who experiences access to gardens, gardening and its ostensible health and wellbeing benefits, greenspaces, and environmental learning.

Author

• Mitchell McLarnon, Concordia University - Montreal