Whose subject is it anyway? Negotiating disciplinary tensions in designing open-ended ecological pedagogies through an urban terrace farm

Abstract

This paper follows the perspectives and initiatives of teachers, who were directly and indirectly, involved in a school terrace gardening project co-designed with some of them. Their narratives included their perceptions regarding students working at the farm, connected initiatives within the curriculum, and any personal efforts prompted by their involvement with the farm space. Their experiences indicate the possibility of using the farm as a transformational space, helping restructure their own identity as well as pedagogical practices. Their narratives also highlight the boundaries created by disciplinary affiliations. In the absence of direct participation, conventional teaching practices seems to affect their use of the farming space and meanings derived from it. These observations are discussed in the backdrop of challenges in facilitating environmentally-oriented teacher education in the Indian scenario. The insights gleaned from the research contribute to the existing scholarship on educational approaches for social change-making and the dilemmas faced by educators in navigating disciplinary expectations.

Keywords:

• Teacher education
• urban farming
• transformational pedagogy
• tensions

Acknowledgements

I thank Prof. Sanjay Chandrasekharan for guiding my PhD work, of which this study is an outcome. I am grateful to Adithi Muralidhar and members of the Learning Sciences Group, HBCSE for their help with video-recording and data transcription. This research was made possible by support of the Govt. Of India, Department of Atomic Energy, under Project Identification No. RTI4001.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Deborah Dutta

Deborah Dutta is a Senior Research Fellow at IRMA. Her work explores community engagement, socio-technical systems, and sustainable food systems. The motivation for this approach stems from the failure of information-based educational approaches in promoting justice-oriented sustainable practices. Her research involves designing practice-based interventions to follow motivation and environmental perspectives emerging from such activities.