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Teaching on the Farm: Farm as Place in the Sociology of Food and Sustainability

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Interdisciplinary Approaches to Pedagogy and Place-Based Education

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Abstract

Place-based pedagogies offer instructors opportunities to use place and space as objects for learning and for critique. This chapter reflects on two years of place-based teaching social science on a multi-acre organic farm. First, the chapter introduces the college, the farm, and the larger community of which they are a part. Next, I outline how the farm can be used as a metaphor to discuss the macro-micro link in the social sciences and issues surrounding diversity. I then offer ways that teaching on the farm can aid in student understandings of epistemic distance and relations of inequality. Finally, I reflect on the connections between the farm and the larger community and their role in student learning.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See e.g. Sobel, Place Based Education.; David Orr, Ecological literacy; Smith, “Place-based education”; Theobald, Teaching the Commons; Theobald and Curtiss, “Communities as Curricula”; Sarkar and Frazier, “Place Based Investigations and Authentic Inquiry.”

  2. 2.

    See Shannon, “Operationalizing Food Justice and Sustainability”; Shannon, “Intersectionality, Ecology, Food: Conflict Theory’s Missing Lens”; Shannon, “Ecology, Food, and Holistic Politics.”

  3. 3.

    See especially Sayre and Clark, Fields of Learning.

  4. 4.

    “Organic Farm Becomes a Reality at Oxford.”

  5. 5.

    “Levels of Analysis: Micro and Macro.”

  6. 6.

    Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 3.

  7. 7.

    Malatesta, Life and Ideas, 178.

  8. 8.

    Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It); White and Williams, “Escaping Capitalist Hegemony.”

  9. 9.

    Gruenewald, “The Best of Both Worlds,” 3.

  10. 10.

    Alkon and Agyeman, Cultivating Food Justice, 1.

  11. 11.

    Carolan, The Sociology of Food and Agriculture, 140.

  12. 12.

    Davies and Vadlamannati, “A Race to the Bottom in Labour Standards?”

  13. 13.

    Leonard, The Meat Racket.; Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved; Shiva, Stolen Harvest.

  14. 14.

    See especially Carolan, Reclaiming Food Security.

  15. 15.

    See especially the term’s use by La Via Campesina at http://viacampesina.org/en/, last accessed July 12, 2016.

  16. 16.

    See Carolan’s breakdown of a number of studies in Michael Carolan, Sociology of Food, 95–103.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Oxford College of Emory University, Oxford, USA

    Deric Shannon

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  1. Deric Shannon
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Emory University , Oxford, Georgia, USA

    Deric Shannon

  2. Emory University , Oxford, Georgia, USA

    Jeffery Galle

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Shannon, D. (2017). Teaching on the Farm: Farm as Place in the Sociology of Food and Sustainability. In: Shannon, D., Galle, J. (eds) Interdisciplinary Approaches to Pedagogy and Place-Based Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50621-0_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50621-0_2

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