“When I Work With Plants, I Feel Complete”: Queer Pedagogies in Land-Based Learning Environments

This article examines the ways in which queer and trans educators of color reflect on, make sense of, and engage with queerness as part of their work in land-based learning environments. Through our engagement with these educators, we demonstrate how their land-based relationships—with a particular focus on the relationships engendered by farming and gardening—afford unique opportunities to challenge normative systems and ideologies like cisheteropatriarchy and coloniality while simultaneously affirming dignity for queer and trans ways of being in the world. Building from interviews and garden parties with educators, we specifically illuminate how land-based relationships support educators in disrupting binaries through their engagement with queer ecologies; finding affirmation in, with, and from the land; and creating pedagogical spaces that are easeful and liberating environments for themselves and for their students. This work helps point to pedagogical possibilities that can help us reimagine how, where, and toward what end we engage in teaching and learning so as to build more just, sustainable, and dignity-affirming worlds.