December 27th, 2024

Potentials for Critical, Community Engaged Place-Based Experiential Learning: Using a Campus Farm to Integrate the Environmental Studies Curriculum

By Jesse P. Van Gerven

Link to the JSE December 2024 CECR Table of Contents

Van Gerven JSE Dec 2024 CECR Issue PDF



Abstract: Sustainability education is crucial for envisioning and enacting the changes necessary to solve the environmental polycrisis currently accelerating around the globe. The field of environmental studies is potentially well positioned to act as a catalyst for transforming both perceptions of and actions toward the more-than-human world. But too often the environmental studies curriculum presents issues of environment-society relations in siloed, disconnected, and atomized ways. What is needed are transformations to the standard environmental studies curriculum and pedagogy, which correct for the inappropriate siloing of issues, while also empowering students and all people to actively participate in the decisions that affect their lives. In this paper, I review and assess an effort to implement a place-based experiential learning (PBEL) module focused on local, sustainable agriculture in an Introduction to Environmental Studies course. I focus on the organization and execution of the PBEL module, as well as the measured impacts on students’ levels of civic engagement. In doing so, I show PBEL can be organized around the principles of community engaged critical research (CECR) with the explicit purpose of empowering individuals and communities by identifying and dismantling exploitive power structures. Finally, I argue this critical, community engaged place-based experiential learning approach needs to be further developed and assessed in a wider variety of institutional and disciplinary contexts.

Keywords: Place-based experiential learning, critical community engaged research and learning, environmental studies, urban agriculture, food justice

 

Introduction
As the consequences of the climate, biodiversity, and other ecological crises continue to accelerate, albeit unevenly, across the planet, it becomes increasingly undeniable that human perceptions of and actions toward ecological systems must change. Sustainability education in formal and non-formal contexts is essential for envisioning and enacting these changes among individuals, families, and communities up to the scale of nation-states and the global community (Boström et al., 2018). Furthermore, as the environmental justice, climate justice, and food justice movements have made clear, there can be no meaningful, lasting ecological sustainability without meaningful, lasting social equity between people, groups, and nations. Environmental sustainability and social justice/equity are not mutually exclusive, but rather, mutually constitutive (Lenzi et al., 2023),

Transformative Environmental Educations
Environmental studies is an interdisciplinary field that brings together natural, physical, and social sciences and the humanities, focusing on environment-society relationships to understand the root and more proximate causes of contemporary environmental issues (Robbins et al., 2022). The field of environmental studies encourages engagement in the personal and (especially) the collective dimensions of social change to increase environmental citizenship, democratic decision-making, and the ability to ask and answer questions of sustainability and equity. Thus, the field of environmental studies is potentially well positioned to act as a catalyst for transforming both perceptions of and actions toward the more-than-human world. However, it remains an open question how to most effectively achieve this potential. Too often the environmental studies curriculum at both the post-secondary and higher education levels present issues of environment-society relations in siloed, disconnected, and atomized ways (Uggla and Soneryd, 2023). This instrumental, disjointed approach to learning and knowledge creation regarding human-environment relations unfortunately confirms and reestablishes the reductivist, machine view of nature that has been both the cause and result of catastrophic, unsustainable exploitation of the Earth’s resources (Harding and Woodford, 2024). Furthermore, the accelerating exploitation of natural resources has been conjoined with growing economic and political inequities and vulnerabilities at the national and global scales. Together, these processes can form a negative feedback loop or “doom spiral” whereby declining environmental conditions diminish people’s economic security, which incentivizes them to engage in even more environmentally intensive and destructive behaviors, which in turn further degrade environmental conditions, and so on (Pellow, 2018).

What is needed are transformations to the standard environmental studies curriculum and pedagogy, which correct for the inappropriate siloing of issues, while also empowering students and all people to actively participate in the decisions that affect their lives. In this paper, I review and assess an effort to implement a place-based experiential learning (PBEL) module focused on local, sustainable agriculture in an Introduction to Environmental Studies course. I will focus on the organization and execution of the PBEL module, as well as the measured impacts on students’ levels of civic engagement. To be civically engaged means that citizens are participating in the life of their community to improve conditions for others (Adler & Goggin, 2005). In doing so, I show PBEL can be organized around the principles of community engaged critical research (CECR) with the explicit purpose of empowering individuals and communities by identifying and dismantling exploitive power structures.

According to the Community Engaged Scholarship Institute (CESI), critical community engaged scholarship highlights the social structural and institutional causes of social and environmental problems by use of critical theories, such as critical race theory, critical feminist epistemologies, post-colonial theory, political-ecology, and other anti-oppressive theories (CESI, 2022). CECR begins from an asset-based understanding of communities and includes an explicit commitment to social justice, equity, and inclusion. Critical community engaged research and learning seeks to mobilize scholarship and learning to serve impacted communities and their initiatives, especially by establishing university/community partnerships. The purpose of these partnerships is to produce and disseminate different kinds of knowledge that breaks down structural and systematic sources of injustice and non-sustainability (CESI, 2022). Although community engaged, participatory, and critical research and teaching have become increasingly popular in recent years, there remains little consensus regarding the most effective means to achieve meaningful community engagement in research (McKenna and Main, 2013; Cornwall, 2008). The meaning and operationalization of concepts like collaboration, participation, and empowerment are not pregiven or fixed. Community engaged critical researchers and instructors must therefore wrestle with the importance of questions like participation for whom, in what, and for whose benefit (McKenna and Main, 2013). Questions like these are especially important for transforming the standard, siloed environmental studies curriculum where research and teaching are usually organized around the needs and interests of the researcher, their institutions, and funding agencies. By refocusing the research and teaching processes on the needs and interests of people and impacted communities, CECR begins to flatten the preexisting hierarchies between researchers and subjects and between teachers and students.

Research and teaching within the CECR tradition is thus attentive to issues and questions of self-identified community needs, relationships, clear communication and shared input, and meaningful outcomes for mutual benefit. Given these central concerns, one potentially promising way of teaching and producing community engaged critical research is through place-based experiential learning (PBEL) curricula. Experiential learning theory is well established in the scholarly literature going as far back as Dewey (Ord, 2012). Building on Dewey’s principles of continuity and interaction, experiential learning is usually executed through a cyclical process of concrete experience, observations/reflections, generalization and abstract conceptualization, and finally testing the implications in new concrete experiences (Kolb, 2014). Ideally, educational experiences are constructed to connect students to a recognized “social enterprise” and thus can demonstrate democratic values such as participation and equity, as well as allow students to observe and reflect on the significance of enacting those values (Sorge et al., 2022). In place-based experiential learning, the actual learning emerges from the local context in which it is embedded and encourages learning beyond career-ready skills needed in labor markets. In other words, experiential learning engages students’ hearts and hands, as well as their heads, which has been shown to increase the effectiveness of environmental and sustainability education (Harding and Woodford, 2024). PBEL, as a method for community engaged critical teaching and research, works to highlight connections between seemingly disparate phenomena. More specifically, PBEL can connect what is already familiar with new knowledge; the sciences with other (more humanist) fields; local contexts with global forces; and students with a specific place (Sorge et al., 2022). The concept of “place” in this tradition refers to much more than just coordinates in geographical space. Rather, the place of place-based experiential learning also exists in social space as constituted by the history, culture, environment, people, politics, and economy within which students must navigate and interact (Sorge et al., 2022; Kolb & Kolb, 2006). PBEL has been shown to enhance students’ content knowledge, critical thinking, course engagement, and civic-mindedness, especially when situated within school gardens (Sorge et al., 2022; Poulsen, 2017; Sobel, 2004).

The places selected for the PBEL module being assessed here were diversified urban farms in Indianapolis, Indiana. Diversified, urban farms are important sites of environmental studies research and learning because they are sites of significant convergence between natural systems and social systems; food systems transform nature into culture and culture into nature (Pollan, 2005). Via the foodstuffs humans forage, cultivate, or otherwise produce, plants and animals are brought from the biotic community into the realm of human meanings, cultures, and societies. At the same time the needs, desires, and tastes of human eaters are reinscribed into the biotic world by way of processes such as land clearing, cultivation and tilling, selective breeding, and, more recently, genetic engineering. Food systems and sites of food production are thus exemplary locations for environmental studies research and teaching, including efforts aimed at transforming environmental studies curriculum via place-based experiential learning as a form of community engaged critical research. Furthermore, such farms are significant to struggles for food justice because they provide alternative sources of food for people beyond the global, industrial food system and its organic off-shoots (Alkon and Guthman, 2017).

Farm Hub program
School/campus farms have become increasingly common sites for place-based sustainability education in secondary and postsecondary settings, usually through student-led co-curricular activities (Clark, 2016; Parr et al., 2007). While sustainability learning and outcomes have been well studied at the K-12 levels, less is known about these at the collegiate level (Filho et al., 2018). The existing literature suggests student engagement with campus agricultural sites is associated with an increased sense of place, justice-oriented thinking, and the interdisciplinary engagement needed to create a sustainable future (Williamson et al., 2022; Sorge et al., 2022; Cropps and Esters, 2021). Because educational activities utilizing campus farms are usually focused specifically on sustainable agriculture and food systems courses, they often lack structured curricular programs with a common learning framework (Angstmann et al., 2019.) This leaves untapped the potential for campus farms to serve as a resource for a more diverse array of disciplines, and to help transform the standard, instrumental environmental studies curriculum.

In 2016, the Center for Urban Ecology and Sustainability (CUES) at Butler University was awarded a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop a farm-situated PBEL curricular program (hereafter referred to as the Farm Hub program) that uses a campus farm as a hub for cross-disciplinary education and research (Angstmann et al., 2019). As a part of the grant, faculty from a wide range of academic disciplines were recruited to develop and implement a PBEL module in one of their courses. Farm Hub course modules were developed and implemented in both lower and upper-division biology courses, as well as courses in ecology, communication, environmental studies, business, primary education, and religious studies (Angstmann et al., 2019; Williamson et al., 2022). Beyond the disciplinary learning outcomes specific to each course participating in the Farm Hub program, overarching student learning outcomes of the PBEL pedagogical framework were: 1. Applying iterative modes of inquiry and disciplinarily appropriate methodologies to explore, reflect upon, and answer real-world questions; 2. Relating key environmental science concepts and their socio-environmental implications to local and global food systems; 3. Critically reflecting upon the impact of food production and individual food choices on the environment, health, and society; and 4. Effectively communicating the results and broader impacts of inquiry-based research to a cross-disciplinary audience (Angstmann et al., 2019).

The Farm Hub program was designed to increase connections between the campus farm and campus curriculum and to study how all disciplines on campus can utilize a campus farm as a space for exploration, learning, and individual growth (Angstmann et al., 2019). Participating faculty each designed and developed their own modules with multiple components to situate disciplinarily relevant concepts and materials within agricultural contexts utilizing a PBEL framework. Generally, the PBEL modules focused on questions and issues of sustainability and equity associated with both the global, industrial food system and local, sustainable food systems, as well as sustainable and non-sustainable farming practices. The PBEL modules were organized around direct experience with an urban farm (concrete experience), introductory activities (abstract conceptualization and reflective observation), a student inquiry project (active experimentation), and a dissemination activity (Williamson et al., 2022). As will be discussed in more depth below, introductory activities were designed to bridge different discipline-specific modes of inquiry with relevant food systems and sustainability related concepts. These include a screening of Ana Sofia Joanes’ (2010) documentary FRESH followed by a critical class discussion, a farm sensory walk and reflective writing, and a dietary carbon exercise where students calculate and reflect upon the carbon footprint of their diet. For the student inquiry projects, student groups completed discipline-specific research projects and presented their findings to community stakeholders. This final component of the modules, the sharing of findings with community stakeholders, is especially critical for PBEL to be performed in the traditions of community engaged critical research (CECR). It is in the sharing of results between students/researchers and community stakeholders where the “circle is closed,” and the commitments to community participation and empowerment that motivate CECR are realized through partnerships and communication.

Materials and Methods
Foundations and Introductory Activities
Included in the Farm Hub project was an Introduction to Environmental Studies course (ENV 200) wherein baselines data was collected in the fall of 2016 and pre- and post-data in the implementation years 2017 and 2018. This 200-level environmental studies course is a requirement for environmental studies majors and minors. From the beginning, the course is organized and taught from a political ecology perspective of environment-society relationships. Political ecology is a perspective within environmental studies that focuses on how power relations shape the coproduction of nature and society. In other words, political ecology refers to the study of power relationships and how they shape and are shaped by interactions with the environment (Neumann, 2009). Research and teaching from this perspective highlights how ecological change cannot be understood without consideration of the social, political, and economic structures and institutions within which it is embedded. By linking ecological change with capitalist development across different special and temporal scales, political ecology has been an important source of critical analyses of the social and ecological effects of economic development and conservation initiatives (Neumann, 2009). Building the course from a critical foundation is crucial for the later success of the community engaged critical research and teaching module. Instructors cannot simply “add critical thinking and stir” to achieve the desired transformative outcomes.

The disciplinary-specific module learning goals were: 1. Students will come to understand, discuss, and describe the structural features and logics of the global, industrial food system and local, sustainable food systems through weekly readings, discussions, lectures, and in-class and out-of-class activities, in order to compare and contrast how food systems can either contribute to environmental problems or solutions; 2. Students will evaluate and assess the strengths and weaknesses of local, sustainable food systems in terms of policies, practices, and perceptions through weekly readings, discussions, lectures, participant-observation fieldwork at an urban agriculture site, and open-ended, semi-structured interviews with urban agriculturalists, in order to critically appraise the necessary preconditions for establishing local, sustainable food chains; 3. Students will design and create a visual/oral and written presentation of their gained knowledge of local, sustainable food systems as it applies to a specific urban agricultural site in Indianapolis through at least four (4) hours of participant-observation fieldwork, taking and utilizing field notes, and open-ended interview techniques, in order to integrate materials, issues, and ideas from the course with place-based, empirical realities of urban agriculture in Indianapolis.

To begin the module, students participate in reading, reflecting on, and discussing Michael Pollan’s (2005) The Omnivore’s Dilemma to gain an initial understanding of food systems and related concepts. Students continue to read, reflect on, and discuss selections from the text throughout the five-week module. Pollan has been referred to as the “dean of food writers” (Patel, 2008) and his work on food and food systems has done much to mainstream the issues over the past couple of decades. Pollan’s (2005) The Omnivore’s Dilemma does an especially good job of introducing the reader to the history and rise of the industrial food system, including the social, political, economic, and technological causes and effects. This text harmonizes nicely with the political-ecology framework, and students are encouraged to recognize how the issues and questions of food production, distribution, and consumption are relevant to other issues and questions of environment-society relations beyond food and the food system.

With the course foundation and some introductory content in place, students then engage in a series of in-class and out-of-class introductory activities, which provide opportunities for abstract conceptualization and reflective observation. First, students individually complete a “farm sensory walk,” where students begin to develop a place-specific connection to an urban agriculture site. In this assignment, students use all five senses to explore the Center for Urban Ecology Farm to personally experience the place, and then answer reflection questions that connect sensory experiences to perceptions of food and how food is grown. Students are instructed to isolate and hone each sense and write down their experience. For example, to isolate their hearing, students are instructed to close their eyes, and stand still, and then write about what they hear. After exploring the farm space with all five senses (using imagination in the place of taste), students are then asked to reflect critically and broadly on an experience they have had with food. The intended outcomes are for students to begin to develop some attachment to and meaning of the place while also connecting course concepts and materials with their personal, lived experiences.

Next, students calculate and reflect upon their “dietary carbon footprints” by logging their meals for one day and utilizing the Food CO2 Calculator at http://www.eatlowcarbon.org/ to calculate their total CO2 equivalent consumed for the day by summing up the CO2ei values for all meals. A carbon footprint is used to describe the amount of greenhouse gases emitted throughout a product’s entire life cycle. Most food produced in the global, industrial food system arrives to your plate after extensive processing and distribution that requires energy and the release of greenhouse gases. Students then write a short reflection piece and discuss their findings in class with the intent of highlighting the connections between their personal behaviors and global environmental problems. This provides another opportunity for abstract conceptualization and reflective observation whereby students draw connections between course materials and personal experiences regarding food, sustainability, and equity.

The third and final introductory activity involves screening Ana Sofia Joanes’ (2010) documentary FRESH: The Movie, followed by a critical class discussion. Joanes’ 2010 film is a solutions-focused food documentary that showcases people who are breaking away from conventional models of agriculture and food production. The film focuses on sustainable agriculture and depicts farmers, activists, academics (including Michael Pollan) and entrepreneurs who are changing America’s food system. Students complete a worksheet consisting of a dozen questions designed to highlight important ideas and content in the film. The worksheet questions then become the basis for critical class discussion and debriefing. Taken together and building from the critical foundation of the course, these introductory activities provide the necessary opportunities for abstract conceptualization and reflective observation, which then informs and enriches the concrete experience at the urban agriculture sites. More specifically, these activities introduce students to the problems and possibilities of both the global, industrial and local, sustainable food systems as they relate to issues of sustainability and equity. This creates conditions wherein community engaged critical research and learning can be achieved through place-based experiential learning, which can stimulate a more integrated environmental studies curriculum.

Student Inquiry and Communication of Findings
For the central, concrete experience component of the unit, students are assigned to groups of three to four students, and each group is assigned to a specific urban farm that serves as the place (or site) for student research and learning. Arrangements are made with urban farmer community partners prior to the start of the semester, and the group assignments and initial group meetings are done several weeks before the start of the module to allow for any necessary changes and adjustments. In the initial in-class group meetings, students exchange contact information and are given the days and times that are available for them to visit their urban farm sites. Because this is done weeks in advance, it is up to the students and the groups to arrange their schedules such as they can visit their site at least twice, for at least two hours each visit. This ensures at least four total hours at the urban agriculture site, as a group. Prior to visiting the urban farms, students are given site-visit guidelines for before, during, and after their visit. In-class students are also introduced to the logic and basic practice of ethnographic field work and open-ended, semi-structured interviews. This includes actively observing and making note of as much as possible about what they see, hear, and just generally notice. Emphasis is put on the importance of taking copious field notes and writing down observations as soon as possible. For the semi-structured interviews, students are provided with a loose interview schedule with prompts asking about the urban farmer’s perceptions of the global, industrial food system and its attendant problems, their views on the sustainable food movement in Indianapolis and how they fit within it; and their thoughts on the important of policies, practices, and perceptions for transforming the food system in just and sustainable ways. These broad prompts allow students to bring their learning from the classroom out to a specific place and share it with specific people, which provides an invaluable opportunity for connections and engagement.

As discussed briefly above, students’ communication of their findings to community stakeholders is necessary for achieving the fourth student learning outcome (SLO) of the Farm Hub Project, but also, importantly, for PBEL to be done in the spirit and tradition of community engaged critical research and teaching. Each student group works together to bring their experiences, field notes, and interview data into conversation with concepts and theories from the course to produce a 12–15-minute group presentation, along with a six-eight page analytic paper. Groups are instructed that their presentations and papers must highlight and elaborate on how their experiences in place inform their thinking and behaviors towards transforming food systems, including the roles of policies (state and federal), practices, and perceptions (farmers and consumers). It is essential to provide students with some minimal structure and guidelines for creating the presentation and paper, but student groups are given a high degree of leeway to articulate their learning and experiences how they see fit. As I discuss in more depth below, creating opportunities for students to describe and explain their experiences in ways that are meaningful to them, along with opportunities for them to articulate their learning in the process, is where PBEL can powerfully contribute to community engaged critical research and teaching.

Results
Sorge et al. (2022) explore the extent to which using a PBEL framework could serve as an effective approach to empower civic responsibility for that place and, by extension, all of society. They hypothesized that providing local, place-based experiences for students to critically engage with scientific processes and content (Bramble, 2005), will lead students to form attachments and meanings to place and inspire civic responsibility. To measure students’ civic mindedness, the Civic-Minded Graduate (CMG) survey (Steinberg et al., 2011) was used. This is a multidimensional instrument with four domains related to knowledge, skills, dispositions, and behavioral intentions. More specifically, the primary knowledge domains have subscales measuring indicators such as volunteer opportunities, consensus building, community engagement, self-efficacy, and social trustee of knowledge (Sorge et al., 2022). In short, the CMG survey is a measure of respondents’ willingness and ability to participate in the public life of their communities to improve the lives of others. Data were collected over two years. Members of the research team—without the instructor present—spoke with the students at the start of the semester about the instructional intervention and associated data collection on student learning outcomes. Students completed consent forms if they were willing to participate. Data for the survey were collected from a total of 39 students over two years (one section in fall 2017 and 2018). Student demographics included eleven (11) first-year, ten (10) second year, twelve (12) third year, and six (6) fourth year students; eleven (11) identified as male and twenty nine (29) female; and thirty three (33) identified as non-minority (white or Asian) and six (6) as minority students. Student GPAs ranged from a minimum of 2.13 to a maximum of 4.0 with a mean of 3.32 (SD .499) (Sorge et al., 2022). Cronbach’s Coefficient Alpha was run on the CMG survey (α=.962) and was found to have acceptable internal reliability (Tabler, 2018).

To understand the differences by course within CMG scores, they examined the mean score and 95% confidence interval and, as shown in Figure 1, the environmental studies course had the highest CMG with a small overlap between its 95% confidence interval and that of the 400-level Biology course. The 200-level Biology course had the lowest mean score. Courses were numbered so that the lowest CMG class (200-level biology) was 1 and the highest (200-level environmental studies) was 3 in the model.

Figure 1. Civic Mindedness Scores and 95% Confidence Interval by Course.

Source: Sorge, et al. (2022) “The Role of Place Attachment and Situated Sustainability Meaning-Making in Enhancing Student Civic-Mindedness: A Campus Farm Example”. Journal of Sustainability Education Vol. 26, February 2022.

 

Sorge et al. (2022) find that while there is a dearth of literature around the role of demographics as a predictor of civic mindedness, their models found that demographics (gender, grade point average (GPA), year in school) were not statistically significant predictors of an individual’s civic mindedness. Rather, it is the course content/activities that their findings suggest are most significant for increasing civic mindedness among students. The authors note that while it is not clear what is responsible for the course level outcomes, they were not surprised that students in the 200-Level Environmental Studies course had the overall largest civic mindedness scores. More specifically, Sorge et al. (2022) argue, “…the [environmental studies] course was able to naturally interweave the farm and its role in the food supply chain throughout the course. Very rarely did a class meeting occur where the instructor did not link the topic of the conversation back to the impact on or role of industrial farms and diversified farms. This provided students with an ongoing reference to their farm experiences and provided a link to their experiential learning opportunities”.

Discussion
Taken together, this strongly suggests that utilizing urban/campus farms as sites of PBEL organized in the emancipatory spirit of community engaged critical research and learning can be part of de-siloing the standard environmental studies curriculum, transforming students’ perceptions of and actions towards the environment, and empowering students and effected communities to achieve sustainability and equity. Each of these interconnected module outcomes can be achieved by leveraging campus/urban farms as significant sites of exchange and convergence between the social and natural worlds. As the cascading ecological polycrisis continues to unleash destruction, disease, and death unevenly around the world, exciting and dynamic new ways of teaching and learning about sustainability and equity are thus leading the way toward broader social transformations.

Far too often, environmental studies curricula (and the research it is based upon) are organized around the disciplinary training and interests of the researchers and their institutions and funding agencies. While these professional interests that typically guide research and learning are not necessarily faulty or nefarious they are particular, and thus may not include or align with the interests of other stakeholders. This is especially the case with issues and problems of sustainability and food production, distribution, and access. For example, academic researchers might approach questions of using urban agriculture to increase food access in underserved communities by focusing on soil nutrient levels or the use of high-yield seed varieties. However, in some cases, community stakeholders recognize the more significant problems they face have to do with property rights and distribution infrastructure (Alkon and Guthman, 2017). The experience of critical, community-engaged PBEL thus allows students to explore and interact with these issues and challenges as they exist spanning the disciplinary divides of soil chemistry, plant biology, law, and economics. Through concrete experience within a critical, community engaged framework, the artificial siloing of sustainability issues dissolves into the messy, interconnected reality of environment-society relationships. Crucially, included in this process is a blurring of the culturally constructed distinctions between the social and natural worlds. By participating in community engaged, critical inquiry at a specific place (or site) or urban agriculture, students directly experience the ways in which nature includes people and people are a part of nature. Students can see, feel, and hear for themselves how ecological systems and relationships structure and underpin our lives and societies while also being shaped and impacted by the actions of people. This is a potentially powerful reframing of the perceived relationship between nature and society away from the dominant, mechanical, and utilitarian view of the Earth and its resources as nothing but commodities and sources of profit. The experience of critical, community engaged PBEL reframes the relationships between environment and society along the lines of stewardship, care, and responsibility rather than mastery, control, and domination.

By contributing to the de-siloing of the traditional environmental studies curriculum and reframing the perceived relationships between the environment and society, using campus/urban farms as sites for critical, community engaged PBEL is potentially a significant tool for empowering both students and vulnerable communities. Critical, community engaged research has always had an explicit focus on and commitment to social justice by mobilizing scholarship in ways that support justice seeking communities and initiatives (CESI, 2022). In practice, this requires using critical theory as the basis for inquiry into community defined needs/interests determined through partnerships and collaboration. Incorporating this method and goal into the practice of PBEL requires students to approach the experience as a collaboration with community partners rather than as an act of service on their behalf. Very importantly, the Farm Hub Project is framed as a “community collaboration” project rather than a “community service” project because there is tremendous difference between working “with” vs. working “for” vulnerable communities. When a person or group sets about working “for” the less fortunate and vulnerable, no matter how well-intentioned it may be, the act subtly or not-so-subtly creates or reinforces a hierarchy between the service providers and the service receivers, with the receivers in the subordinate position. This often-unrecognized dynamic of charity and service-learning has limited the transformative potential of many service-learning projects at different levels, as well as the work of some NGOs and development agencies. Alternately, students participating in the Farm Hub Project were instructed to work with community partners who bring different knowledge, skills, and perspectives. This partnership is established early on and maintained by open, transparent communication. Students bring their learned knowledge and analytic methods from the course, while community partners bring their lived, place-based experiences and perspectives. This is clearly potentially empowering for participating community partners who are no longer relegated to the passive, subordinate status of “service receiver”. Rather, within the framework of critical, community engaged research and learning, community partners are positioned as active agents capable of affecting change. However, this approach to PBEL is also potentially empowering for students as well. Students can see and experience the power of collective action to identify and begin to solve real world problems, while developing the conceptual tools to act wisely and well in the world.

Conclusion
Sustainability education is crucial for envisioning and enacting the changes necessary to solve the environmental polycrisis currently accelerating around the globe. The field of environmental studies is potentially well-positioned to act as a catalyst for transforming both perceptions of and actions towards the more-than-human world. What is needed are transformations to the standard environmental studies curriculum and pedagogy, which correct for the inappropriate siloing of issues, while also empowering students and all people to actively participate in the decisions that affect their lives. I have reviewed and assessed an effort to implement a place-based experiential learning (PBEL) module focused on local, sustainable agriculture in an Introduction to Environmental Studies course. I focused on the organization and execution of the PBEL module, as well as the measured impacts on students’ levels of civic engagement. I showed PBEL can be organized around the principles of community engaged critical research (CECR) with the explicit purpose of empowering students and communities by identifying and challenging exploitive power structures. Sorge et al. (2022) found that the environmental studies course (under consideration here) had the highest scores on the Civic-Minded Graduate (CMG) survey of those in their study. This suggests the PBEL module had a positive impact on students’ willingness and ability to participate in the public life of their communities, including moves towards greater sustainability and equity. This positive impact was itself facilitated by the de-siloing of the environmental studies curriculum and the transformation of students’ perceptions of and actions toward the environment.

However, as Sorge et al. (2022) note, it is not clear if it is the activities being utilized in the course, the instructor’s disposition, the students who are taking the course, the topic of the course, a combination of these four, or some other unknown(s) that are impacting the course level outcomes. Since the course was shown to be a significant predictor of civic mindedness, how an instructor implements the PBEL module and urban farm into their course could have a significant impact on CMG, place attachment, and other outcomes. Additionally, it could suggest that outcomes are impacted by differences between disciplines, such as those between the social and natural sciences, regarding teaching and learning about topics such as values, ethics, and emotion. Further research and pedagogical experimentation will be necessary to answer these questions about the importance of disciplinary values and enculturation on the course outcomes. Additional approaches to implementing critical, community engaged PBEL need to be developed and assessed in a wider variety of disciplinary settings to establish best practices for sustainable and equitable outcomes. Furthermore, critical, community engaged PBEL must be developed, executed, and assessed in a much wider range of educational settings and institutional contexts. The module and project under consideration here were done at a small, private, teaching-oriented, liberal arts school in the Midwestern U.S. However, urban agriculture sites have become ubiquitous in even small metropolitan areas in recent decades, and sustainability and equity challenges of food production and access are omnipresent in the U.S. and around the world. Consequently, there is tremendous opportunity to reformulate the strategies and approaches considered here in a wide variety of settings, including larger research universities, land-grant schools, and HBCUs in the U.S., as well as indigenous serving institutions around the world. Through the spread and diffusion of community engaged, critically directed PBEL, the environmental studies curriculum can live up to its potential to help transform peoples’ perceptions of and attitudes toward other people and the natural world to achieve an equitable and sustainable future. This all happens one experience at a time.

 

References
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