When the Garden Becomes the Campus: Four Strategies for Just Sustainabilities

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

Abstract

Scope and Significance. Educational researchers are conducting original and arts-infused research disrupting industrial growth campus models and cultures of domination while resituating learning gardens at the nexus of cultural and educational resurgence. This paper explores four current strategies and exemplars around this inversion of the role of a learning garden as liberatory campus in itself. In this process, researchers open up fresh sites of anti-racism, just sustainabilities, environmental justice, and cultural resurgence. Could these models, from the edges of sustainability education, support garden-based learning initiatives in the struggle against development pressures on urban campuses?

Methods. This multi-case study (Stake, 2006) describes four emergent graduate educational research projects currently underway at a small liberal arts college in the United States, each of which models different strategies of garden as liberatory campus. Data include interviews, arts-based reflections of site designers, and qualitative coding of project artifacts. Data analysis for the study will conclude in Fall 2018. The research utilizes arts-informed quality strategies (Cole & Knowles, 2008) to ensure effective synthesis.

Theoretical Lens. Disruptive transdisciplinary potentials are emerging from the borderlands of sustainability education (Lotz-Sisitka et al., 2015; Selby & Kagawa, 2015). Learning gardens are important loci in this context (Williams & Brown, 2012). This research adopts Holmes’ (2016) lens for arts-based, borderlands-informed research that nurtures place-centeredness. It leverages “‘translocality’ to explore meaning-making across multiple spatial sites in the name of ecosocial justice, ...that potentiates coalitional consciousness… and multiple forms of belonging” (p. 45).

Informing Literatures, Cases, Points of Finding Synthesis. The potential takeover of food sovereignty and justice work by well-intentioned actors makes strong educational opportunities for equity and justice, anti-racist allyship, dialogue, and liberatory practice in learning gardens. Case 1 describes anti-racism training for white folks involved in community food justice garden project led by people of color in Tacoma, Washington.

Just sustainabilities augments historically-informed environmental justice education with future-focused solutions. Case 2 involves designing a campus that is a working permaculture farm and nature preserve as a center for early childhood environmental education (EECE). This garden campus outside Baltimore takes a just sustainabilities approach, and leverages this research into leadership training for people of colour in EECE.

Resilience in the borderlands emerges as a theme across these cases. Queer ecologies advocate for interstitial spaces and border work. Case 3 explores a queer sustainability climate justice learning garden and labyrinth as campus in Portland, Oregon.

Case 4 involves Indigenous research on traditional ecological knowledge and ideas of traditional cultivation strategies. This case reconceives what is gardening away from settler-colonizer notions of tilth, towards subtle and reciprocal practices and reconnective landscape co-shaping via a study of Navajo weavings as embodiments of sustainability teachings.

How can these ‘garden as campus’ educational research initiatives refresh and inform struggles on university campuses “on borrowed time and borrowed land”? The final distillation will be an arts-based synthesis using the transdisciplinary imagination (à la Brown et al, 2006) to develop a multi-layered textual-visual montage regarding garden as campus.

Author

• Marna Hauk, PhD, Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies and Prescott College