Community Garden Scholar

Over the next couple of weeks, my goal is to finish a major essay on how aspects of food justice and civic ecology are reflected in community garden projects in higher education contexts. Two themes in the essay are sustainability pedagogy and bridging scholarship & activism, which come from thinking about community gardens as sites of learning and action. My aim is to pick out some of the assumptions, arguments, and connections in the literature and make meaning of them. It sounds like a lot, and it is. However, with moral support from my doctoral student colleagues, I am preparing to surmount what has been quite a hurdle in this scholarly journey. In order to stay on track and sustain the sense of community that is so important to this work, I have set up a series of virtual, drop-in, co-working sessions. These are listed in my calendar , so if you are a student, writer, or practitioner in any field who would benefit from a mutually supportive environment like this, please jo...

The New England Grassroots Environment Fund's 2017  RootSkills Conference is coming up on November 30 - December 2 in Manchester, NH. I will be presenting "Care and Feeding of Educational Community Gardening Projects" with Leora Mallach of Beantown Jewish Gardens and Tori Dahl of Antioch University New England's Community Garden Connections . Program description: Community gardening is a practice that takes place in many different settings and for many different reasons. Garden education can contribute to larger goals around wellness, sustainability, climate change, food justice, spirituality, connection to the land, and many other issues. Sometimes the balance between education and production can be a real challenge! Networks of gardens and gardeners present unique opportunities for learning and growth. Learn about two kinds of educational community garden projects in an interactive format that allows for exchange of resources, creativity, and support. Le...

The American Community Gardening Association 2017 Conference: CONNecting our Roots  has been deliciously invigorating. The conference theme seems especially poignant this year, as I continually "dig" deeper into community gardening as both an extension of my professional journey in sustainability education and the means for "growth" as a community-based and critically-oriented researcher. (I am not the only attendee who finds every opportunity to use garden metaphors; they are everywhere!) I still believe strongly in the power of higher education and local efforts to generate synergistic solutions for health and justice in our food systems, and thereby shift our larger social, economic, and ecological spheres toward greater sustainability. I am finding more and more that a balance between theory and practice - academic and "dirt under the nails" approaches - is the path to real progress. Being able to engage with other dedicated, intelligent, and courage...

Today marks the second and final doctoral weekend of the fall semester. Earlier, my cohort and I exchanged presentations on our essays about the intersections of our professional interests with service learning and community-based scholarship. As a way of sharing with the wider academic/professional community, here are the figures from my presentation, with my working bibliography for the essay.  Figure 1: The intersection of two themes I am working with,  i.e.  the bridging of higher education and food systems and the continuum of praxis (theory and practice, thinking and doing). The figure that follows contains an idea that harnesses these seemingly disparate challenges together and provides a crux for my conceptual framework. Figure 2: Education is cultural work. I like to think about what's possible when the worlds of academia and community food converge around the value and practice of sustainability. This work requires new, more responsive models that trans...

In doing some background research for a literature review and photovoice research project I am conducting this fall, I came across the 2015 report, " Improving Access to Food Systems Among Communities of Color: A Food Justice Issue Report to the Oregon Food Bank "  - written by Alma M.O. Trinidad, Helen Camden, and Anne Coleman of Portland State University's Center to Advance Racial Equity Research , in cooperation with the Oregon Food Bank . I am interested in this report for many reasons, and it's an excellent example of the kind of work I want to continue doing in my doctoral program and beyond. A few aspects I'll mention here are the authors' engagement and empowerment of community members in the process of research and advocacy, and the sensitivity with which they considered different cultural compositions of Portland neighborhoods. They did a great job of identifying the aims and methods of their research, and presenting their findings in a way that re...

I was honored to be one of twelve Graduate Scholars selected to present and serve at the  12th International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability , hosted at Portland State University (Portland, OR) this weekend. Here are a few photo highlights: Faculty participating in my workshop, "A Scholar's Garden: Inquiry into the Landscape of Food Justice Scholarship and Implications for Sustainability Education." Two main questions we explored, through a collective concept mapping activity, were: How do scholarly disciplines and cultures approach food justice, and what does this mean for sustainability praxis? What could a sustainability pedagogy that embraces food justice look like? It was a pleasure to get to know and support other Graduate Scholars. Nazan Madak (of Anadolu University in Turkey) and I had a chance to watch the PSU Farmers' Market being set up from the Smith Memorial Student Union on Saturday morning. My favo...

Visit the Monadock Farm & Community Coalition 's event page for details: Produced by the Monadnock Farm and Community Coalition and Monadnock Food Co-op, Healthy Monadnock Champions November 9 – 15, 2015 The  6th Annual Feast on This! Film Festival features movies that educate our community about the diverse issues affecting our national, regional and local food and agricultural systems. We chose films that  will spark conversation and action  around building stronger local, regional and sustainable food systems. FILM SCHEDULE: 5:30pm Monday, November 9, 2015  – Hosted by Prime Roast Coffee, Keene 3 Acres in Detroit A willful urban farmer sets out to transform an abandoned house into a greenhouse 7pm, Tuesday, November 10, 2015  –  Hosted by   The Cornucopia Project, Peterborough Lunch Love Community Passion, creative energy and persistence come together when Berkeley advocates and educators tackle food reform and food justice ...