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NEW! from Community
Works Journal
Online Magazine for
K-16 and Community Educators
FEATURED ARTICLE
Not a Chain Link or a Picket Fence: Social Justice Pedagogy
in an Urban Garden Project read full version online
By TARA AFFOLTER
 There was a flurry
of activity as I stepped into the urban garden that students from my
college were helping construct at the Bronx Academy of Letters (BAL). Ben
was attempting to set up boards to roll the wheelbarrow up the steps; Kenny
was kicking a soccer ball with his siblings (waiting for the next load of
dirt to arrive); Janet was checking the radish plants and Jacob began
ushering me to the garden beds. A tour began and the four students
pointed out the raised beds, different plants, and the barrels they had
acquired and sawed in half to use as planters. Their stories bounced
off of each other, overlapping into an excited and slightly more adult
version of “show and tell.”
I was just about to praise the work when one of the students asked,
“Has anyone talked to you about the fence?” This was soon followed by a
barrage of things that needed to be discussed during my brief check-in at
the garden. “The cucumber miracle,” “the strawberry compote
demonstration,” and various tensions between four intensely dedicated and
equity minded young people approaching the work with overlapping, but
sometime divergent lenses. In the exchanges that followed I glimpsed
the complexity and challenge these students had truly undertaken in
building a garden at an urban middle school.
"Environmental
justice is seeing the environment as this piece of a very large puzzle in
establishing equality and equity…but it is the glue that ties in
everything. It establishes health and it establishes core human needs that
will help anyone pursue whatever empowerment or whatever betterment they
need to beyond the physical needs. But we first need the environment…the
air we breathe, the food we eat, in order to function as human beings. Once
we are at that level we have what we need humanly in order to pursue what
we need socially."
Kenneth Williams,
Middlebury College
student and founding
member of the BAL garden
Building a
sustainable urban school garden (which had been initiated by a few of
the dedicated teachers at the school) and creating meaningful environmental
educational programming was certainly an important goal, but the project
was far more than that. These students had committed to approaching all of
the work by centering equity and utilizing social justice pedagogy and
practices in all lessons. Each of the founding members had made connections
to the intersections between environmentalism and issues of race, class,
and poverty. There was an eagerness to do more than ponder these
connections but instead enact environmental justice at a local and personal
level. In the following pages, using journal entries and interviews
with the students, I seek to chronicle and analyze social justice pedagogy
that took place in this garden project.
Participants and
Community
The four teachers featured in the study were all rising seniors at
Middlebury College when they helped found the garden. With
backgrounds in environmental studies, education, economics, geography,
sociology, and political science the four students attempted to bring
multiple perspectives to address this absence in their studies. This,
coupled with a deep need to connect college life to home, led them to
secure grants that would allow them to physically and monetarily support of
the garden project.
Ms. Rodrigues
Janet Rodrigues is a multi-racial woman who identifies strongly with her
Mozambique heritage. She also stresses that she is a New Yorker.
Janet attended The Beacon School with Kenny. As to her identity in the
garden she felt, “the students saw me as a woman of color, but I think
being a woman was probably the most important part of that to them.”
As the only woman in the program and the person who happened to have the
least amount of gardening or environmental studies experiences, Janet felt
isolated at times and yet adamant that her voice be heard in terms of not
creating a top down structure in the garden. She stated,
"I guess was
trying to honor the fact that not everyone needs to have these values and
not everyone needs to have the attitude about the right things to eat—we
shouldn’t project these ideas onto the students. Yet despite the tensions
and questions that emerged for Janet around the garden, her passion for the
project was quite clear. For her, the garden provided a way to access
some of the rich resources offered at Middlebury College and share those
with the BAL students."
The Students
Most of the BAL students who participated in the garden during the summer
lived in the subsidized housing across the street. Their ages ranged
from 10 to 12. All the students came from an African, African American,
Afro Caribbean, Latin American, or Latin Caribbean background.
The Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx, where BAL is located, is a
community that constitutes one of the poorest congressional districts in
the U.S. The area is chronically under-served, with over half of the population
below the poverty line and a plethora of health and nutritional
issues. With only are 12 grocery stores in all of the South Bronx
serving 88,000 people, (a sharp contrast to the 35 grocery stores on the
Upper West Side for 60,000 people) the neighborhood is a ‘food
desert’. (Zelkha, 2011). According to Winne (2008), food deserts are
“…places with too few choices of healthy and affordable food, and are
oversaturated with unhealthy food outlets …” (p. xviii-xix).
Recognizing the enormity of the problem, the dedicated faculty and students
at BAL committed themselves to a vision of establishing health and
environmental education opportunities for their community. They procured a
small grant to help facilitate the creation of a vegetable garden and begin
a nutrition program. Kenny, Jacob, Janet, and Ben worked to attain more
funding through grants, joined forces with BAL and the garden began to grow
from an idea to a reality.
Show don’t Tell: The
struggle against top down knowledge
All of the teachers in the garden were very concerned about being outsiders
and promoting a particular brand of environmental elitism. Thus, they
approached each lesson with a critical lens and spent time reflecting on
what they were doing and why. The need for this critical focus was brought
into sharp relief much earlier in the project when the teachers observed a
lesson and cooking demonstration from a local chef.
....continued
read full article online
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