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

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.