This semester, elementary pre-service teachers and I are engaged in a collaborative social action project in service towards a community vegetable garden on our university's campus. A very small group of students, faculty members, and I broke ground on the garden in the spring and managed a fairly successful growing season of eggplant, greens, and tomatoes, for example, all of which were donated regularly to a local food bank. Even though digging around in the dirt and planting are nearly over, there's a lot of work to do to keep a community project like a vegetable garden afloat: generating funds, grant writing, supply and equipment donations, community outreach, amassing a volunteer workforce, social networking, and developing educational materials, among others. I've enlisted my undergraduates to assist the garden group and I with these activities as part of our social studies methods course. They pulled through magnificently, taking tremendous initiative to work with me on this project. Ultimately, as an essential part of social studies education, I am hoping that the civic engagement activities make enough of an impression that they consider implementing service projects in their future classrooms.
Our semester in social studies is devoted entirely to farm-to-fork issues and the hazards of our industrialized food system, which includes a reading of The Omnivore's Dilemma. As part of our discussion of related issues, Tony Geraci, head of Baltimore City Public Schools food and nutrition services, graciously took time out of his busy schedule to speak with my class about his efforts to reform the school lunch program in Baltimore City. His efforts are emblematic of what is absolutely essential for inclusion in the public school reform movement. Yet, the number of roadblocks he has also experienced in the process, many of which will be profiled in a forthcoming documentary Cafeteria Man, reveals the entrenched corporate interests resistant to a problem that seems so obvious: if you want students to achieve, don't feed them garbage.
As a social studies teacher educator, I made my annual pilgrimage to its national conference in Denver. Discussions of elementary level social studies are already few and far between; those on environmental and food system issues are fewer still, which makes sense. The more specialized the topic, the smaller the audience. But I've observed so far a relatively new dedication to environmental education. Content presented on these issues typically falls under the umbrella-term "sustainability." Perhaps we are at the moment where the so-called "sustainability movement" fractures into constituent groups. Even within social studies itself, you have geography, economics, history, civics, and a load of others. Sustainability covers a number of its own topics: water, pollution, food, conservation of ecosystems and wildlife, and global capacity, to name a few. Moreover, I'm not confident that lumping these topics under the term "sustainability" really tells us much of anything. Whether our practices are sustainable or not does not take into consideration the numerous moral and ethical questions of human exploitation of the environment and non-human species. For example, just because it could be marginally possible to make more sustainable the production of milk-fed veal, is this a practice that ultimately needs to continue, its overall impact on the environment notwithstanding?
There is strength in various constituencies linking together to promote good environmental stewardship. Under the umbrella of sustainability, all interest groups can advance a pro-environmental message. In keeping with a theme loosely tangential to urban agriculture and our food system, one glaring omission seems to be a serious consideration of animal rights and vegetarian or veganism within education for sustainability. Industrialized processing of animal flesh for food creeps into an ethical arena that I'm sure many educators would like to avoid. Even for an educator who does not eat meat, I am even unsure how to begin the conversation in the classroom. One recommendation could be to restructure K-12 public schools so that they are caring environments and not overly rationalized systems that prepare future workers. This is perhaps a much larger conversation about the role of care and nurturing in education. Yet, if educators take time to promote a caring school climate as they do with meeting various achievement benchmarks, then advancing moral and ethical dialogue in the classroom, as a complement to current sustainability efforts, would not seem like a huge stretch for students.