Blog
In Up-to-date York garden, students develop their social roots and critical awareness
Aug
Iris, a high school student in Up-to-date York City, took a course designed to prepare public school students for college. As part of the course, she visited Park Slope Food Cooperativeone of the oldest membership companies in the United States. Members work month-long shifts in exchange for access to affordable, ethically sourced food and goods. Students enrolled in the course—called Community Roots—explored the larger social, political and historical issues related to food and place while also gardening and learning about activities related to food.
When Iris told her family about her experiences, “they said,It’s white people’s food!“” she recalled. Iris’s family had emigrated from the Caribbean island of St. Vincent and had never heard of a food cooperative. They also understood, through their experiences, that racism and white privilege shape the availability of food for people.
(Shutterstock)
Iris joined the co-op, drawn to its alternative consumer model. Through membership, Iris and her family had access to affordable staples and familiar, robust foods. Joining the co-op was one of several actions Iris took to become an outspoken advocate for women’s and immigrant issues.
Iris later completed a BA in Black Critical Feminist Studies and a BA in Law with a focus on Immigrant Rights and the Environment.
Golf course under construction in Brooklyn
(Pieranna Pieroni), Author provided
Iris’s course, Community Roots, is on combining ecology and justice. The course is part of College Now, a free transitional college program that is a partnership between the City University of Up-to-date York and the Up-to-date York City Department of Education. Jennifer, one of the authors of this story, is a mentor to Pieranna, the other author and director College Now at Brooklyn College.
Community Roots uses the entire city as a classroom. It sees place based learning as imperative to teaching and learning. Urban gardening serves as a starting point for learning about the land and relationships, as well as about food, consumer culture, and social activism.
Read more: How to teach kids where food comes from – teach them gardening
This food justice
The Community Roots emphasis emerged from a real-world experience of conflict between the university and a community garden. Pieranna was a member of a booming community garden that was located just outside the campus where she worked. She invited local high school students who were enrolled in College Now courses during the year to participate in unstructured gardening during the summer.
As student interest grew, Pieranna formalized the activity as a service-learning course, and the number of horticulture students increased. A turning point in the evolution of the course came when the college’s decision to demolish the garden to expand the parking lot was met with opposition from horticulturalists and community greening advocates. As issues Sustainable development issues became increasingly visible in public dialogues around the city, irony of fate that a city college is destroying a community garden the desire to expand the parking lot attracted attention.
Ultimately, the garden was razed and restored as a smaller student garden on a strip of land bordering the expanded parking lot. Community Roots did not have access to the fresh garden for several years. However, lessons learned power and displacement related to the history of colonization and gentrification helped change the course of events.
Happily, New York City has a thriving network of community gardens and school gardens. The course included other urban gardens and grassroots food organizations, such as the Park Slope Food Coop, of which Pieranna and Jennifer are members.
Sowing the seeds of change
Raven, a student who grew up in Coney Island, recalls reading a Community Roots class by a Brazilian educator and theorist Paulo FreireBook Pedagogy of the OppressedFreire introduced an approach called problem-posing: teachers and students learn and teach together. Their primary objects of study are themselves, each other, and the ideas and issues that shape their reality and relationships.
(Pieranna Pieroni), Author provided
Pedagogy of the Oppressed made Raven reflect on her high school experience—what Freire calls the banking model of education, a one-way learning style in which the teacher transfers knowledge to the student’s mind. Raven captioned a comic she created about her early high school experience:
“It’s as if we opened our skulls and the teacher put something inside us…”
In Community Roots we delve into theorists like Freire and other traditions liberation pedagogy. In this way, the course focuses on students’ life experiences and allows for development critical awareness.
Read more: Role Play: A Drama Class Where Students Practice Changing
Raven compared her high school experience to her fresh, critically engaged style of learning. She returned to Community Roots as an undergraduate mentor, where she skillfully engaged her peers in land education.
Raven took her class on a walk around her neighborhood to explore how Coney Island was rebuilt after Hurricane Sandy in 2012: the boardwalk and tourist attractions were renovated, and developers who already had their eyes on the area redoubled their efforts in an area that had long been in need of investment. In contrast, small businesses, community gardens and other amenities that residents enjoy visiting have been lostUp-to-date luxury high-rises, higher rents and upscale businesses are pushing out long-time residents like the Raven family.
Raven currently studies sustainability, works as a manager for her school’s hydroponic farm, and is committed to helping communities like hers build resilience that works for everyone.
Teaching for transformation
(Shutterstock)
Community Roots attracts a variety of students like Iris and Raven: immigrants, children of immigrants, and first-generation college students. Every student brings to the classroom deep, rich experiences of food, places that are important to them, and their own relationships with these things. Learning begins in the garden and branches out into related topics and different parts of the city. When students make connections through critical thinking and relationships, their ability to lead in their families and communities is strengthened.
The names Iris and Raven are pseudonyms chosen by the students to maintain confidentiality.
