A garden's place in critical food systems education

Abstract

For several years, hundreds of students have been tour guests and interns at a community garden, the Beach Flats Garden, run by Mexican and Salvado­rian farmers in Santa Cruz, California. This paper reflects upon engagement between the gardeners and local educational institutions and opportunities through three major themes: connection between practices of solidarity, urgency of action, and peda­gogy; possibilities in engaging with the frameworks of critical food system pedagogy alongside the les­sons of autonomia and activist ethnography; and the importance of teaching the history of agroecol­ogy and more broadly of social research in connec­tion with resistance to capitalist-colonial domina­tion. The article discusses what place the garden holds in expanding and deepening the scope of food system education through providing examples of noncapitalist exchanges and practices, a space of resistance to gentrification in a highly competi­tive land market, and decolonial foodways that emphasize gardeners’ traditional agroecological knowledge.