Youths’ navigations of botanical gardens: bids for recognition, ways to desettle practice

Abstract

How can we ‘desettle’ the colonial discourse and worldview of botanical gardens and its practices in teaching about plants? How can we move towards engaging deeply with who we are and think we are in relation to place, land, and the world, grounded in an intricate sense of harmony? How can we move our work in botanic gardens beyond regarding land, plants, and nature as commodities for causal consumption, or as places to rapidly observe but typically not touch? I explore these three questions in this paper through a weaving together of some of the literature on education and informal learning in botanical gardens and narratives from my research with urban youth of color in the Botanical Garden of Montreal. In doing so, I make evident youths’ navigations of botanical gardens and their bids for recognition as other than detached from nature. Together, these narratives help to rethink taken for granted practices of education about plants in gardens grounded in Western views of science and lack of a more serious engagement with holistic perspectives of humans in and with nature.

Keywords:

• Botanical gardens
• youth of color
• navigation
• scale-making
• plants