Community Food Systems: 12 and 19

Journal Entry 10/12

Rachel Slocum’s article was profound to me: this article as well as the other readings provide me with a foundation for the work I am hoping to get into post-college. The questions she poses to the prospective non-profit organizers are the types of questions that are incredibly important, yet they are the questions that are typically not even addressed in this line of work.

I have spent two summers working with an extremely distressed community, New Bedford. Working with the predominantly Latino and Black children of the community, I felt exposed to something that I had never stumbled upon before in my experience as a teacher.

When I had worked in predominately white upper-middle class Ipswich, I was working with children who have never seen racism. The children of color in that community were treated equally, maybe with fascination at times because of the novelty of their skin, but otherwise, the children shared similar economic experiences and the same quality education.

The New Bedford children, on the other hand, were certainly more aware of the forces working against them. They didn’t trust their teachers (mostly Portuguese immigrants) who would forbid them from speaking Spanish in school despite speaking only in Portuguese to each other. They didn’t trust their curriculum, which blamed them for their low rankings, and instructed them to believe that education is entirely standardized and not designed to keep interest, but instead to achieve score standards designed for the dominant culture. They didn’t trust their parents, who fell victim to drugs deliberately circulating in their community as yet another method of oppression; parents who instill values of gang membership and loyalty, money-making schemes (I met one fifth grader employed by his father to push drugs onto his peers at school), depression and self-degradation (many young girls I met had family members and friends who were prostitutes), and low self-esteem and self-expectation (to my question “What age do you think is appropriate to have children?” I was met with the common answer “15”).

The experiences I had in this community inspired me to redirect my focus away from a purely environmentalist perspective towards an approach to making change via social justice work. But I hadn’t begun to flesh out the how-to aspect of this focus. Not until this semester, taking classes such as this one and a few other classes I am taking at this time on the topic of racism and white privilege.

I want to be able to leave this school with a well-formulated plan to bring back into that community and to create real change for the community by the community. These articles are a way for me to begin learning how to do this.

Journal Entry 10/19

Having worked as a teacher with young children and be it that I am intending on continuing in a career as an educator, the articles this week were especially important to my goals in integrating sustainability in the classroom.

Beyond the Garden showed me a thorough and logical way to infiltrate the ridiculous bureaucracies of the education system to encourage legitimate learning. I’ve been teaching for a while now. I’ve worked at the YMCA in Ipswich as an elementary ages art teacher as well as preschool teacher; a Montessori Preschool in Amherst; a YMCA in New Bedford as an art teacher; an out-source non-profit art program available to at-risk 5th graders in New Bedford; a non-profit art outreach program in New Bedford that visited different scheduled sites such as projects, parks, and summer programs. I have spent a lot of my time with youth and I have always sought to address issues such as sustainability too them.

Here, I have had many results. I’ve been disappointed at the lack of education and lack of caring about this topic with my kids in Ipswich (although I suspect that things there are different now, as in the last several years Ipswich has undergone a serious “greening” in all areas); I was surprised at the amount the preschoolers of UMASS faculty and students knew about climate change and local organic foods; and I was horrified about the ignorance imposed upon my New Bedford kids as a result of their poor quality education.

My New Bedford kids knew what school was about: School is about getting sufficient MCAS scores and nothing else. School is about humiliation and depression, about peer pressures and peer conflicts. School is a place to feel out of place, stupid, and insufferable.

I would try to tell them that this isn’t how it is everywhere, that some schools weren’t all about the MCAS, some teachers out there really wanted them to learn what is important to them, to their culture and their goals.

But what good is it to tell them about these great institutions and people when they aren’t an option for these children? I have thought a lot about how I can bring gardening experience to these kids like Nuestras Raices does in Holyoke. I’ve used art education as a tool to break down barriers of hate created in their community and to support self-confidence and to improve self-worth. I have talked to these children as people with beautiful ideas and valuable intelligences, not as a group to be pushed around and told what to do and punished when the scores aren’t good enough.

These kids so badly need an escape from the highly unjust No Child Left Behind act. I have not spoken to a single teacher who is in favor of this act that is destroying any interest a child may be able to experience in school. I have seen children learning from the practical application of art projects, and translating these skills into their other intelligences. I know for a fact that these children would benefit so much from school gardening and from learning more about self-sufficiency and sustainability.

But how do you instill values of learning that are the most beneficial from school when there are no teachers available to instruct and facilitate this learning? How can a school raise a garden when they receive less and less funding for the most basic things such as facilities and industrial food? How can a school produce healthy and versatile students when the schools are being built on dumping grounds permeating with PCB and other highly toxic agent? (*as is the case with New Bedford’s middle and high school, as they could afford no other space)

I think that the Farm to School program and these articles are detrimental to schooling. But how can schools that are treating children as less than people and are being allotted critically damaging funds hope to implement these programs?

This is the task I have given myself. It is my goal to achieve an education and to be able to bring what I learn to this area and give these children the education and tools for self-sufficiency and justice that they so dearly deserve, but have been robbed of by their federal government.