Are you willing to decenter traditional lectures and essay assignments in university courses? What are the steps to administer course assignments that require students to engage with community members and gardening activities? Our workshop discusses the partnership between Denver-based Consumption Literacy Project (CLP, Dr. Austine Luce, Executive Director) and CU Denver digital anthropologist Marty Otañez. We cover skills to cultivate and sustain genuine relationships of trust between instructors, students, non-profit leaders and garden-based citizen scientists in underrepresented communities. Citizen scientists are individuals and their wisdom and knowledge that often get ignored by people in higher education.
We’ll begin the workshop with introductions and an ice-breaker activity, followed by a brief discussion about the university-community partnership as a resource to rebuild human-land connection, provide evidence-based impact, and support individual and collective flourishing. Additional topics are ethical approaches to decolonized and non-extractive group based digital projects with themes of composting, water technology, and food sovereignty.
Most of our time together will be spent co-creating a list of best practices for university course-related community engagement activities that center the voices of attendees. We’ll close the workshop with a case study of the public access documentary film “The Montbello Spiral Garden” co-produced by Drs. Otañez and Luce. Participants will leave the workshop with the list of best practices for fieldwork assignments and an expanded network of contacts to develop and administer course activities with citizen scientists who devote their labor to community gardens.
