Liberatory Practices and Potentials in Brooklyn School Gardens

ABSTRACT

School gardens provide collaborative grounds for education and cultivation, operating within the U.S. education system and in connection to movements to rectify societal and environmental injustices. Based on perspectives of gardeners in public schools in Brooklyn, NY and the intersection of school gardens with other movement work, a four-part framework of liberatory practices and potentials via school gardening is outlined. This paper asks: What liberatory practices are happening in Brooklyn school gardens, and what is the potential for building upon them, particularly in relation to rectifying injustices faced within racially minoritized communities? In this study, gardens were found to support personal achievements, health benefits, adult mentorship, peer bonding, identity affirmation, community transformation, and positive relationships with the natural world. Some programming addressed social and environmental injustices explicitly, but students and staff identified potential to expand this; particularly needed are clear curricular prioritization and social and material support. Important to engendering any form of liberation through school gardening are: intentionality and transparency regarding program aims, just forums for student engagement and impact, and critical acknowledgement of the political and geographic realities in which these gardens operate.

KEYWORDS:

• liberation
• gardens
• social movements
• K-12 education
• environmental education
• emergent strategy

Acknowledgments

Thank you to research advisors David N. Pellow, Stuart Sweeney, and Susie Cassels, as well as the students, teachers, and farmers involved in the study.

Disclosure Statement

There is no financial benefit or conflict of interest deriving from the author’s publication of this article.

Notes

1 Facilitator interviewees shared that in schools in NYC, students are encouraged to take a school lunch regardless of whether they will eat it because of how schools are compensated for meals.

2 James Baldwin made a similar call in 1963: “Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school … I would try to make them know – that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal … I would teach him that there are currently very few standards in this country which are worth a man’s respect. That it is up to him to change these standards for the sake of the life and the health of the country … .”

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Foundation: [Grant Number DGE 1144085].