Excavation in the campus fields: Critical food literacy, campus food growing spaces and climate justice

Keywords: Campus food growing spaces; pedagogy; structural conditions
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 10

Abstract

Critical food systems pedagogy has become an urgent focal point in acknowledgement of the fact that (re)education, broadly speaking, will be central to any putative efforts to scale up a pluriverse of alternative food systems (La Vía Campesina, 2017; Meek, 2020.) However, to meet the challenges of the present, a paradigmatic shift in food systems pedagogy is required – “fundamental changes…in both what and how we teach” (Galt, Clark, and Parr 2012, 43. Emphasis original). Within this context, campus food growing spaces (CFGS) have emerged as promising pedagogical sites that constitute a counter-point to the conventional agricultural education paradigm (see Classens and Burton, forthcoming; LaCharite, 2016).

Drawing on Cairns’ (2021) insightful distinction between pedagogies of immediacy and pedagogies of excavation, I make the case that the importance of CFGS resides in their ability (realized and potential) to act as sites within which structural socioecological inequities are exposed and reckoned with. In the absence of deliberate pedagogical intention, CFGS are susceptible to an inadvertent politics of containment, in which “immediate action in the local environment…[creates]….positive feelings in the present.” (Cairns, 2021, 9). Challenging the socioecological destruction wrought by the capital intensive, industrialized food system requires, instead, an excavation of the structural conditions through which it is perpetuated. This paper draws on on-going research focused on students, staff and faculty involved with CFGS across Canada.