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Purpose. Stories of school gardens and gardening are often portrayed with a certain innocence. These narratives, however, run the risk of precluding more expansive opportunities for teaching and learning in farms and gardens - sites that are ripe with possibilities toward the work of renewing social and ecological relationships. This paper carries the objective of troubling dominant and normative approaches to farm and garden based education by amplifying the perspectives of farm and garden educators who are Black, Indigenous, and/or people of color. Mapping these perspectives provides a foundation in which to identify key principles and practices for garden-based pedagogies that are at once culturally sustaining (Paris, 2012) and sociopolitically conscious (Madkins and McKinney de Royston, 2019).
Theoretical Framework. To engage this work, we leverage the concept of educators’ political clarity – defined as forms of critical consciousness that educators demonstrate through their pedagogy – as a guiding theoretical perspective (McKinney de Royston, 2020). For educators, political clarity can be defined as “one’s pedagogical consciousness about the historical and institutional nature of oppression and an understanding of teaching as a political, ethical, and relational endeavor that socializes youth, whether implicitly or explicitly, into certain personhood and futures” (McKinney de Royston, 2020, p. 380).
Methods and Data Sources. We work with the concept of political clarity in the context of interview data from an empirical study with farm and garden educators in California. After conducting and recording twenty-five semi-structured interviews, we engaged in a first analytic pass of thematic coding the transcripts to identify episodes in which educators demonstrated political clarity with respect to their pedagogy. We then shared these early themes and patterns with study participants during a series of ‘garden parties’ in which we engaged in collective sensemaking and further participatory analysis to help identify additional findings and refine a final set of categories.
Findings. Our results indicate that garden educators of color bring strong sociopolitical commitments to their pedagogy, articulating forms of political clarity that are unique to farms, gardens, and related outdoor settings. These results converge on a set of interrelated yet distinct principles that we suggest can guide sociopolitically conscious approaches to garden-based education. These include 1. building from learners’ cultural knowledge and practices, 2. attending to historical and intergenerational land-based traumas, 3. taking critical and holistic perspectives on health and well-being, 4. engaging land with intentionality and reverence, and 4. employing relational pedagogies and collective decision-making.
Significance. Ultimately, we suggest that these principles can undergird forms of culturally-sustaining models of teaching and learning in garden-based settings. We additionally suggest that these findings help extend the concept of educators’ political clarity beyond the context of schools and classrooms to land-based settings where various systems of oppression manifest in distinct, albeit interrelated ways. Finally, we note that the majority of educators in the study called attention to a dearth of professional development opportunities and curricular supports to foster these forms of sociopolitically-conscious teaching, pointing to a need for further evidence-based resources identifying key practices in garden settings.