City Farms: Possibilities for education on a damaged planet

This qualitative research study explores educational possibilities on a damaged planet, specifically through formal and informal education in city farms. We consider city farms in two cities, where they have established histories, to explore understandings of educational practices; discourses of relationships with the rest of nature; and possibilities for climate change education.
 
City farms are charities, open to all, that show, among other things, where food comes from through farm animals and edible plants. They can also be understood as much larger comings-together or assemblages. ‘Thinking through assemblage urges us to ask: How do gatherings sometimes become “happenings” that is, greater than the sum of their parts?’ (Tsing, 2015, p. 23). With Haraway, we want to move beyond both technofixes and despair (p. 3) and to explore how we continue living on a damaged planet. In all this, city farms can act as sites of hope, to reflect on learning, and on connectedness to community, to culture and to the rest of nature.
 
City farms are under researched and diverse sites of education with much to teach other educational spaces. We see education as relational, about becoming-with (Young & Wenham, 2024). In other words, education is about making kin. Drawing on both Haraway (2016) and Tsing (2015) has given us new ways of storying to generate possibilities for educational practice and theory far beyond city farms themselves.
 
We connected with city farms through existing social networks and through repeated visits, to explore the sites, engage in informal conversations and soften entry to the field. Subsequently, we conducted semi-structured interviews with eleven participants, across nine different city farms in the two cities. These interviews explored participants’ roles and their reflections on the aims and practices of their city farms, particularly in relation to education. Most interviews took place outdoors, some as walking interviews. Discussions were disrupted and reorientated by pigs snorting, geese honking and colleagues asking questions. The ethical considerations, informed by BERA’s Ethical Guidelines (2018, 2024), were enriched and expanded to incorporate consideration and value of the more-than-human, as well as the human participants (Hacking et al., 2023). Walking interviews and those in public spaces also require specific consideration, with more likely possibilities of being over-heard or interrupted. Our approach to analysis drew on ‘grounded theory methods as flexible, heuristic strategies rather than as formulaic procedures' (Charmaz, 2003, p. 251). We also drew on MacLure (2013) who considers ‘the productive capacity for wonder that resides and radiates in data, or rather in the entangled relation of data-and-researcher’ (p. 228).
 
The findings are extremely rich, nuanced and wide-ranging. Here, we focus on two significant emerging themes.
 
Firstly, affect runs through the data. The analysis indicates children and young people’s ‘excitement’ in learning outdoors and making kin. Affective aspects of education, beyond assessment and qualification (Perkins, 2024, p. 7), are very important for city farms. There were many more primary than secondary aged children visiting the farms and we also heard significant stories of young people excluded from secondary schools thriving in the openness and through engagement with the rest of nature.
 
Secondly, the findings show the complexities of praxis, the nuances of enacting interwoven cycles of reflection and action (Kahn, 2010; Misiaszek, 2020). There was a strong sense from some interviewees that the city farms should ‘show, not tell’ and avoid imposing knowledge from above with direct instruction. Interviewees described the tensions of, on the one hand, trying to show what farms are like and ‘where food comes from’ but, on the other hand, showing ‘farms’ that are very different to actual industrialised farming. Discussion and dialogue were thus sometimes needed to support the showing. This echoes the value of praxis.
 
Our writing with city farms and with Haraway (2016) and Tsing (2015) is an attempt to move beyond binaries (urban/rural or human/nature) to tell new stories. Haraway suggests ‘staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or Edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings’ (p. 1).
 
City farms are, at least in part, about where food comes from. We argue here that food can be a daily reminder of our multispecies and global interconnections – if we have a deeper understanding of it and where it comes from. The affective engagement in praxis found in city farms can ‘open our imaginations’ (Tsing, 2015, p. 19) to what can happen in other educational settings on a damaged planet.