Experiential Learning and Healing

What would happen if we were to flip traditional pedagogies of teaching sustainable agriculture on their head? In other words, what would happen if sustainable agriculture education shifted from one that focuses on techniques, to one that focuses on healing. Many students who attend Minority Serving Institutions embody the consequences of a broken food system. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and asthma are more common in minority communities and are often linked to the industrial food system. Therefore, teaching students who have experiences of living with low food access, have had family members lose jobs because the drought has closed the farm, or have relatives with forms of cancer that can be traced back to contaminated drinking water requires a form teaching that is less concerned about what content to teach and more vested in providing students pathways to heal. This paper explores how experiential learning and healing can be fertile grounds to develop a transformative agroecology that pushes student awareness, engagement, and motivations for sustainable agriculture into new and exciting directions.