Investigating the social relations of community gardening for adult education


Mitchell McLarnon, Concordia University

This paper presentation describes and analyzes the social relations that emerged from four separate adult education internships/community-based garden projects in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal. Methodologically and epistemologically, I combine institutional ethnography (IE; Smith, 2005) and visual methodologies (Mitchell, 2011) to explore and uncover how adult education internships in community gardens, gardening programming and greening can work to produce disproportionate outcomes for adult learners, educators, community workers and community members. Drawing on a range of datasets including IE interviews, fieldnotes, photographs, and textual and policy analyses, I trace from people’s experiential knowledge of attempting to use gardens for social (employment, food security), environmental (pollination, greening for reducing the urban heat island effect, etc.) and educational reasons – into local policy and texts that shape garden and adult education possibilities in urban contexts. In the process of creating and funding adult education internships and many different gardens in community organizations and gentrifying neighbourhoods, I have elucidated specific institutional contrivances (e.g., funding, policy, geographies of injustice, work processes, discourse, curricular) that are presently structuring and defining who experiences access to gardens, gardening and its ostensible health and wellbeing benefits, greenspaces, and environmental learning. Starting in the actual material sites where gardening and adult education take place (a university campus, community organizations, greenspaces, local neighbourhoods, and so on), my findings on the educational, environmental, institutional, historical, geographic and political-economic relations suggest that while adult education gardening programs have the potential for community-based learning, increased wellbeing, and ecological awareness, the use of gardens in adult education needs to be highly contextualized within critical discussions related to settler-colonialism, neoliberalism, the history and politics of land and water use, (green) gentrification, and land access and its growing criminalization. My reflexive findings add to adult education scholarship on cities and food insecurity (Sumner, 2021); however, I complicate and deromanticize the notion that community gardening can address food insecurity and can contribute to wellbeing for all. In this historical moment of climate emergency, people living, working, learning, and gardening in cities need to see how environmental sustainability efforts and policies produce differential effects at the level of a large and diverse urban population. This work advances adult education scholarship within IE and feminist historical materialism (Smith, 2005; Bannerji, 2020). My discussion encircles policy and governance issues that require further research in the context of adult environmental education (especially in this historical moment of climate emergency) such as urban human displacement, neoliberal garden funding, limited sustainability discourses, healthcare, safety, transportation, and housing.

This paper will be presented at the following session: