New Article: How to Learn from the Land

Posted by Community-based Global Learning Collaborative on August 1, 2023

In the early summer of 2022, in time with the full strawberry moon, a group of Drexel University undergraduates and Philadelphia neighbors convened for a one-week intensive course on food and land security in our city. College and community students spent the week learning together about issues at the intersection of community health, gentrification, and cultural preservation. For this week, the city and its gardens were our classrooms.

Our instructors were leaders in food culture work, mostly women of color embedded at the front lines of these issues. We partnered with three local community agriculture sites — Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden, Iglesias Gardens, and Norris Square Neighborhood Project — where we spent mornings working with the land, sharing stories of resistance and regeneration, and taking part in culturally relevant meals prepared by these same teachers: Lex Wiley and Chef Laquanda Dobson at Sankofa; Cesar Viveros and Erendira Solano at Iglesias; and Cesali Morales and Iris Brown at Norris Square.

The principal objective of this course — which will run again this September — is to bring students into immediate contact with food security projects through close, hand-to-hand work alongside expert practitioners. Through the virtual sessions, they are encouraged to make connections to global conditions and to structural parallels. And through the open learning platform, where they can access readings, reflection questions, and discussion prompts, students cultivate intellectual curiosity and an analytical framework.

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