Publication Date
2020
Document Type
Dissertation
Committee Members
Yoko Miura, Ed.D. (Committee Chair) Mary Brydon-Miller, Ph.D. (Committee Member); Alan Wight, Ph.D. (Committee Member); Daniel Warshawsky, Ph.D. (Committee Member); Michelle Fleming, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Degree Name
Doctor of Education (EdD)
Abstract
Although school gardens have been increasingly popular in the United States, much existing literature evaluated success of the programs from a limited set of criteria, such as the extent to which gardens reformed student eating habits and nutritional knowledge. Yet, school gardens offered benefits and outcomes not immediately apparent within this reform paradigm. In addition, the attention on forming a particular kind of food consumer ignored the diverse cultural and racial histories related to agriculture and food in the United States. In this participatory action research (PAR) dissertation, participants, including school staff and community partners, explored one school garden program in a historically segregated and disenfranchised community. Through an emancipatory framework described by Freire (1970) and hooks (1994, 2003), participants reflected on and shared how and why they co-created a school garden program during the COVID-19 pandemic and nation-wide protests for racial justice. Through photovoice, mapping, and gardening activities, participants expressed meaning, values, and vision far beyond the typical reformatory goals often measured in school garden studies. Most notably, participants described experiences of love, empowerment, and justice they experienced through the school garden program. Through this research, other school garden programs can identify why a school garden matters to their specific context and how to align the meaning participants feel to future plans for the garden. Most notably, this research demonstrated the value of PAR as a method for cultivating school gardens, gardens as sites for social justice, and the critical role of an ethic of love (hooks, 2006) in building community around garden projects.
Page Count
315
Department or Program
Department of Leadership Studies in Education and Organizations
Year Degree Awarded
2020
Copyright
Copyright 2020, some rights reserved. My ETD may be copied and distributed only for non-commercial purposes and may not be modified. All use must give me credit as the original author.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
