Schools as Experiment Stations: Conceptualizing Science Through Plantation Pedagogy

• In Event: Unforgetting Settler Colonial Histories of Science and Mathematics Education

Abstract

Objectives
Land Grant colleges and the agricultural experiment stations that were attached to them were created during the Civil War and post emancipation era. One of their purported goals was to study scientific farming and disperse that knowledge to the American public. However, education scholarship has not systematically engaged the history of higher education and agricultural experiment stations in relation to broader histories of post emancipation schooling for Black communities and Indigenous communities both in the US and globally. Placing the history of land grant universities and scientific farming study at the center of the study of these institutions brings into focus how scientific orientations related to farming and plantation agriculture have been tied to the proliferation of educational institutions.

Perspectives
This study engages scholarship in educational history, Black studies, and Science & Technology Studies to inform this historical study. I draw from histories of education such as Watkins (2001), Anderson (1988), Lindsey (1994), and Marquez (2024) who detail the role of manual and agricultural education for Black and Indigenous students and particularly how it was connected to plantation agriculture. Plantation agriculture is fundamentally related to settlement and colonialism. Settlement is a process that happens in concert with slavery as the plantation must begin on a settlement, which displaces Indigenous peoples. Thus the space of the plantation and settlement are coterminous and interconnected (King, 2019). This is paired with Rusert’s (2009; 2015) concept of the Plantation Laboratory which uses a multidisciplinary approach to connect the history of plantation agriculture and slavery to science studies. Alongside Rusert, I engage scholars such as Latour and Woolgar (1986) who critique the scientific method through ethnographic engagement with laboratory life.

Mode of Inquiry and Sources
This paper draws from archival sources gathered from the following locations: Hampton University archives, Tuskegee University digital archives, Hawaii Mission Children’s Society archive, and other digitally available primary sources. I also consulted secondary sources on the history of agricultural experiment stations. These sources range in time from 1860–1940 and have a global focus with the history of Black and Indigenous education placed at the center.

Substantiated Conclusions
I argue that the “plantation laboratory” is an educational as well as a scientific project. The laboratory/school as a hybrid concept emerges within manual and agricultural labor programs and land grant colleges alongside the proliferation of plantation economies. The laboratory, the farm, and the school are interconnected entities with the concept of experimentation firmly enmeshed in their foundations. I note that higher education institutions conceptualized “science” (particularly through the scientific method and the idea of experimentation) in relation to farming practices as part of systems of teaching slavery and settlement within anti-black and anti-indigenous schooling institutions.

Significance
As Katherine McKittrick (2013) notes, the plantation as a complex and capacious concept has futures beyond its historical formation. The pedagogy of plantations and their laboratories and experiment stations also have futures that continue into the present day through how schools conceptualize science and agricultural education.

Author

• Bayley J. Marquez, University of Maryland