Keywords

1 Introduction

University Scenario

The student’s face crumpled and tears began to roll down her cheeks. Swiping at them with the back of her hand, words tumbled out. “She was so angry! I know it wasn’t about me, not really. I mean, yes, of course, it was about me because I wanted to talk with her. But all this stuff came out, like it was stored up for a long time, and I was just the trigger for it coming unleashed. It’s like I was the university, and she was lashing out at everything it’s ever done to the community. So I guess it wasn’t directed at me, not really. I mean she was making all kinds of assumptions about me, like I must come from a family of privilege just because I’m at the university, like I didn’t understand anything about their history, like I was going to be like every other student. But I had written to her, and also outlined at the beginning of our meeting what we were trying to do, how it was different. She finally calmed down and actually apologized and said it wasn’t really personal, but it sure felt pretty darn personal. I was able to finish the interview, but for the rest of the day I felt shaky and couldn’t focus. Couldn’t sleep either. I wasn’t going to tell you, but I finally decided I had to, because maybe she’ll treat other students that way too. She doesn’t know anything about me, and never asked. I’m not from some wealthy family, I’ve had to fight every inch of the way to get here, get scholarships and loans, and I still don’t feel like I fit in. It all feels so unfair, I’ve never felt so judged by someone who doesn’t even know me.”

This student was not new to community engagement. In fact, this was her second food systems class, and she also had worked with local nonprofits as part of the university service outreach to community, and was now serving as my teaching assistant. She felt more prepared than ever to approach her work with community in a listening, learner’s mode, respectful of the community member’s agency, and thought she had the tools to meet with this individual who had served as a respected leader for Charlottesville’s low-income neighborhood causes. But her distressing experience forced me to question our approach. Something wasn’t working. We were employing all the best practices that I knew from my work as a public policy facilitator and mediator. Or so I had thought. What was I missing? It would take many years for me to filter and understand this and similar experiences with students. They have led me to a new place of understanding that we who teach at a university can no longer approach working with our community neighbors with the idea that good intentions and the application of best practices from other fields will suffice to ensure a mutually beneficial experience. To ensure that community experiences with students result in real benefits to community, we have to rethink our entire framework for when and how to design community engagement into our classrooms. – Tanya Denckla Cobb

Community Scenario

The Board Chair of the Public Housing Association of Residents (PHAR), reminded me of my great aunt, Betty-Rose Baker. She carried a sturdy build and a head of grey hair plaited back in braids. And when she spoke, her voice carried the grounding weight of southern Black English. But most importantly of all, the Board Chair came from agrarian roots. Hailing from Kingston, Jamaica, she referred to herself as a “Kingstonian,” a city child brought up working in the coffee fields picking beans during the harvest season. If you ever visited her stoop in Westhaven, a public housing community, for a meeting, she’d instruct you to lay flowers in the empty holes she’d previously dug. She’d speak to you firmly yet softly in the shade of the banana trees as you worked her small plot of garden space. But if she ever called you into her office at the Westhaven Clinic, with the woman who was both Westhaven Clinic Program Coordinator and former Vice-Mayor, you were sure to hear that firm, slightly coarse tone of hers. The one she used most frequently at the PHAR board meetings, that drew the line of business and laid a concrete foundation of solid ground for her to stand on. In unison with Clinic Program Coordinator’s approachable yet steadfast demeanor, it meant there was no space nor time for debate.

I had been called to Westhaven Clinic for a meeting with both women. A community member had complained about the garden project I was spearheading as a Master in Public Health student at UVA. But she had done more than simply complain about Growing for Change. Through tears, the resident had demanded that students not come into Westhaven. She’d worked for the students, serving them daily in Newcomb Dining Hall, and wanted her neighborhood to be spared from student involvement. We had thought Growing for Change would be different. We didn’t seek to engage with the community as a whole but instead work with individual families to co-design personal gardens. We attempted to assure the resident that she didn’t need to participate, nor did her neighbors have to either. Everyone would have their choice respected and abided by. We hadn’t expected 46 families to sign up for the project its first year, demonstrating people’s value on green space and desire to grow fresh produce. An initiative that set out to empower individuals, as a collective, was now engaging an entire community requiring more than 80 student volunteers to co-design, build, and deliver gardens. The resident had been correct in some ways, and her complaint had caught the ears of Deans at the University. Moving forward, I would need to listen closely to insights and recommendations from both women to heal any harm that was brewing.

I had trouble with the University. Something wasn’t quite lining up between academic theory and practice. I saw this to be most evidently true when I considered the poor working relationship between University scholars/academics and community members. I know now that it was pedagogy and community engagement that centered student experience and lacked commitment to build equity. It was community engagement working without a clear understanding of the social strata demarking grassroots and grasstops organizations. – Shantell Bingham

Though these events happened at the University of Virginia (UVA) in Charlottesville, Virginia, they might easily have happened at hundreds of other universities across the nation, at any point in the post-Civil Rights era. That these scenarios happened, in 2012 and 2015, respectively, is perhaps a reflection of how the deep legacies of harm have begun bubbling to the surface and breaking into an open boil, often in ways that might be unanticipated by the academy but in ways that may be considered long overdue by their community neighbors.

In developing this chapter, we use UVA’s relationship with the City of Charlottesville as a case study and have grappled with the question of how our university might do a better job of bridging the divide with our community neighbors. This divide reflects a nearly universal experience of historical town-gown tensions, but in Charlottesville it is far more, and more accurately might be called a gulf.

More specifically, we explore how university food systems faculty and students have attempted to bridge the town-gown gulf in Charlottesville, what methods have been used for engaging with the community, and what lessons might be learned about how and why these methods for community engagement might miss the mark in terms of advancing long-term systemic change. Looking at long-established core principles for community engagement and new concepts of equitable collaboration, we conclude that the university classroom has unique constraints and needs that set it apart and require a new framework. Further, we find there is an important distinction between engaging with community as a means of providing support for community goals, and engaging with community as a means of advancing long-term systemic change for sustainable, equitable food systems. To address these constraints, we propose a new framework of “equitable pedagogy” as a faculty guide for how urban agriculture studentsFootnote 1 can work with their community neighbors to maximize the possibility for win-win experiences, as well as a decision tree to guide faculty in deciding what level of engagement with community would be most appropriate for their food systems class. This chapter presents a new approach for equitable pedagogy that extends outside of the classroom and works to heal legacies of harm in our food system. The principles of equitable pedagogy are particularly relevant to food systems planning and urban agriculture courses for their historical roots and interests in community equity and also because of their focus on community systems. Though this is our focus throughout the chapter, these principles are relevant for any university department that seeks to foster equity and equitable relationships with the surrounding community.

Understanding the Town-Gown Divide

A brief overview of the history of university-community relationships is provided in Mayfield (2001), who identifies three distinct phases for how universities historically have related to their community neighbors. In Phase 1 higher education offered a religious orientation for the purpose of educating the ministry and social elite. In Phase 2 the Morrill Act of 1862 created land-grant universities to provide public service in the form of research and outreach assistance to agriculture and industry, followed by Phase 3, in which the modern academic research institution emerged with a focus on either education or academic research, where “the community was their laboratory, and the residents were test subjects” (Mayfield 2001, p. 233).

Mayfield suggests this final shift in the town-gown relationship began at the turn of the twentieth  century when sociologists adopted the philosophy of the “settlement house” movement, which advocated immersion in community life and community-based research as imperative for understanding and addressing urban social conditions. But unlike the settlement house movement, which was seeking solutions to real problems, Mayfield suggests this philosophy became a justification for university academics to see the community as a laboratory for gaining knowledge.

If Mayfield is right, the settlement house movement, rooted in compassion and service, ultimately became an instrument for its antithesis, dispassionate analysis and utility. The university, once a source of community assistance and support, transformed itself into an extractor of knowledge, using the community as a handy kind of petri dish for discovery, learning, and testing hypotheses.

Through a race and equity lens, however, it is important to understand that the Mayfield model fails to examine how the town-gown relationship impacts race relations and equity to this day. The “petri dish” analogy is personal for African Americans, as race has played a role throughout the town-gown relationship. Land-grant universities, enabled in 1862 by the Morrill Act, were not designed to support all equally; Marcus Comer, Associate Professor and Extension Specialist at Virginia State University (Wikipedia 2019)Footnote 2 explains that when Morrill was passed, the premise of “separate but equal” still prevailed in the South which meant that separate institutions for Blacks theoretically could have been established. “However, since the majority of Blacks were still in slavery at the time and the act did not divide funds on racial lines, there were no institutions established for blacks with the exception of Alcorn State University in Mississippi” (Comer et al. 2006). In Freedom Farmers, author and scholar Monica White, describes the creation in 1902 of Cooperative Extension (originally named the Cooperative Farm Demonstration): “in the first three years, none of these agents were Black, and white agents refused to talk with Black farmers, whether they were sharecroppers, tenant farmers, or landowners. This was despite the fact that African American farm workers actually outnumbered whites in the South, yet the agents operated as if they could save the South [from the boll weevil infestation] while ignoring its majority” (White 2018).

Even more recently, 400 Black farmers filed a class action lawsuit in 1997, known as Pigford I (Pigford v. Glickman) against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), in which they claimed that Afrcan American farmers had been systematically discriminated against on the basis of race, and consequently denied fair treatment and access to farm loans and assistance which, in turn, led to widespread financial ruin, foreclosure, and land loss by African Americans. The lawsuit further claimed that the USDA had failed to investigate properly or respond to complaints for over ten years, from 1983 to 1997. Though they won the lawsuit in 1999, the settlement would be marred by a tortuous legal path and numerous further claims of discrimination. In the first round (Pigford I), of the 22,145 claims filed, 15,645 received payments. In the second round (Pigford II), when farmers who had missed the deadline for Pigford I were given a second chance to file a claim, of the 65,950 claims submitted by individual farmers within this second deadline, only 2,268 were found to have met the strict criteria that they missed the first deadline for reasons “beyond their control” (Kiely 2011).

The fact that more than 87,000 African American farmers submitted claims of discrimination in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is testimony to the continuing culture of racism and discrimination that have separated Black people from the land to which they have had historical deep attachments, and the fact that Black farmers have continued to act to improve their own circumstances and to challenge these racially oppressive rural social structures. It is structures and experiences like this that have created and reinforced suspicion and hostility among African Americans toward institutions – such as universities and government agencies – that put forward the “we’re here to help you” attitude that has rarely served to support African Americans.

Still, it is worth noting that, despite our nation’s history of systematic efforts to deny Black access to both land and knowledge, Comer points to how the Cooperative Extension, the farmer outreach branch of land grant universities, is built upon the pioneering work of Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver whose “research and outreach efforts helped to educate millions.” White observes that “in contrast to the deficit-based approach that is common among academic when addressing issues of the Black community,” the scholar W.E.B. DuBois “offered an asset-based approach that focused on community strengths and resources” (White 2018). White describes the importance of what she coins “collective agency and community resilience” (CACR), and points to the historical work of Booker T. Washington’s to build institutions like Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now Tuskegee University) to support community-based agriculture; George Washington Carver’s focus on building self-sufficiency through scientific contributions to organic and sustainable agricultural practices; and DuBois’s emphasis on the importance and political power of cooperatives – all of which laid the bedrock foundation for today’s movement toward CACR.

Returning to Mayfield’s town-gown model, in which he describes Phase 3 as the transition of universities into research institutions, this final phase is equally fraught with racial implications. Communities of color have a longstanding relationship with academic institutions utilizing Black bodies to advance scientific medical research. Harriet Washington, author of Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present, told Time magazine that “Tuskegee shouldn’t be the first thing people think of,” but it’s just “the example that the government has admitted to and acknowledged. It’s so famous that people think it was the worst, but it was relatively mild compared to other stuff.” As shown in both the movie and book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the use of Henrietta Lacks’s cells for the scientific advancement for so many medical game-changers, such as the polio vaccine, cloning, and in-vitro fertilization, is but one example of how people of color have been treated historically as a “petri dish” readily available for experimentation, without being accorded the same human dignity, respect, or legal rights that would have been assumed and were required for whites. Set against the backdrop of horrific experimentation and use of Black bodies for medical and white supremacist purposes, it is easy to understand that the inherent tension between university and community would be a thousand-fold stronger for African Americans.

Last but not least, another town-gown stressor is the fact that universities are joined at the economic hip with their community. They provide a steady source of service and dining jobs to the community during the academic year, and also provide steady customers for local housing, goods, and services. Despite these connections, stress lines between university and community run deep. As federally tax-exempt educational institutions, universities have power through both money and, in some cases, eminent domain (West 2019) to snap up prime real estate, causing the community to lose valuable tax income. They are governed separately from the community by their own Board of Visitors, often politically appointed, and set their own mission and goals independent of the community. They are able to make decisions regarding physical expansion, student body expansion, sports, and other issues that directly impact the community — all without consulting the community. Given these stressors, even in the best of times there are bound to be tensions and conflicts between university and community.

The University of Virginia was a center for eugenics, beginning with its first President Edwin Anderson Alderman, appointed in 1904 by the Board of Visitors that had previously governed the University. Governing for nearly 30 years, Alderman was an outspoken supporter of eugenics and had ties to white supremacy. Author and scholar Gregory Michael Dorr, whose dissertation at UVA opened a conversation about these issues, writes that “Alderman’s ties to eugenics in part legitimized the practice as a cornerstone of Southern social policy, and played a role in launching U.Va.’s medical program to the position of national repute which it enjoys today” (Dorr 2018).

Perhaps the University’s legacies of harm are best reflected in a 2012 report by the University and Community Action for Racial Equity (UCARE) in which it is noted:

We live in a community whose members often believe that they are either invisible or that their presence at the University of Virginia is not welcomed except as its lowest-paid workers. For these individuals, most of the University Grounds appear off-limits to them, their children and their community. That portion of the surrounding community that knows the University as “The Plantation” may not know its entire history, but it knows enough to comprehend and resent the deception (“Call for Reflection and Action” 2012).

While UVA remains one of the largest employers in the Thomas Jefferson Planning District, 20% live below the federal poverty-line in Charlottesville, according to the census (US Census Bureau, n.d., “Quickfacts”), while the city as a whole maintains a low unemployment rate of 2.5% (Charlottesville, VA Economy, n.d.).

Now, add to this recipe several other factors that emerged in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Add in the university’s waning interest in public service (the land grant model) and increasing priority on an inward focus of research and teaching. Add to this a growing awareness of economic disparities along lines of race and class. Add the long reach of slavery into the twentieth century through Jim Crow laws that institutionalized white privilege, effectively undermining and preventing the possibility for equal opportunity long after the demise of the laws themselves (Meisenhelter 2018). And finally, bringing it home to Virginia and Charlottesville, add in the stunning fact that in 1860 in “39 of 148 counties at least half the population was enslaved. Albemarle County, with Charlottesville as its county seat, had a population of roughly 14,000 slaves and 12,000 whites,” or 54% enslaved people (“Enslaved Population”, n.d.).

This is the story of Charlottesville. This is where, as Charlottesville entered the twenty-first century, more than 140 years after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, it was common to still hear community residents of color refer to the university as the “Plantation on the Hill.” And, nearly two decades into the twenty-first century, the university is still referred to as an extractive industry, highlighting that for communities of color, the legacy of exploitation has been long-standing and not easily healed. In fact, one might say that the social shift of working with property to working with freemen triggered a transformation towards silent forms of resistance and oppression within our society and especially the food system. These oppressive strategies, which have limited access to resources such as land and farm services, as previously highlighted, have played a role in designing urban spaces and rights to urban agriculture. Equitable engagement within the field of urban environmental planning presents an opportunity for healing legacies of harm that are both explicitly and implicitly at work. It cultivates avenues for practitioners and academics to promote collective knowledge and grassroots community ownership (rather than planning their environments for them) and thereby enabling the grassroots community to gain further control over their environment and food.

Any visitor to UVA or Charlottesville understands very quickly that our region is steeped in Thomas Jefferson, renowned for authoring the Declaration of Independence, writing the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, serving as the third President of the United States, and also signing into law in 1807 the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, which criminalized the international trade of slaves. The blind veneration of Jefferson as a virtuous man who opposed slavery began to crumble with revelations about Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings and their affirmed line of descendants. This bears mentioning only because it is but one symptom of the legacy of harm of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy that was cracked wide open in August 2017, and has created the backdrop for our current challenge of addressing the impacts of this deep history. A second aspect to this legacy is directly tied to Thomas Jefferson’s founding in 1819 of UVA, when enslaved laborers were used for construction and continued operation of the university.

It is impossible to understand the intense suspicion, resentment, and sometimes outright hostility of community members toward UVA without understanding the long legacy of harm that continues to manifest and fester in Charlottesville. The people of Charlottesville live with deep paradox, knowing they are home to the nationally revered Thomas Jefferson, while grappling with the now “open secret” that he was at minimum a pedophile, and some even speculate a rapist (Stockman 2018). Similarly, the university is also grappling with the myth that slaves were not allowed at the university. The truth is finally being excavated and brought into the light, both figuratively and literally through archeological excavations and digging through historical records. We now know that as many as 5,000 enslaved laborers built and supported university operations for over four decades. As strange as it now seems, this truth was purposely and effectively hidden from students, faculty, and donors for nearly 200 years. But the legacy of that slavery was passed down through generations of families, never forgotten, and is a source of ongoing university-community tension.

All of these historical tensions were laid bare during the violence and trauma of August 12-13, 2017, and have remained front and center even years later as Charlottesville continues to struggle in the aftermath to chart a new course forward. White supremacists and neo-fascists marched with torches through the center of campus, terrorizing students and faculty with racist chants, and the next day through the center of Charlottesville, killing a young woman named Heather Heyer, injuring at least 30 others, and resulting in a fatal helicopter crash that killed two state troopers. Lawsuits are still underway during the writing of this chapter. Some of the injured are still contending with recovery from their injuries. It is far from “over.” This trauma brought to the surface, in a way that can no longer be suppressed or ignored, the legacy of harm that never before had been addressed.

As emotions continue to roil and boil over to this day, both city and university are undergoing intensive re-examination and discussions of their ways of doing business, and both are experiencing changes in leadership. One key element emerging from this period of reflection and consideration is a new understanding by the university that it must acknowledge and address the long legacy of harm of slavery and impacts on the university’s enslaved workers and their families, who built and then continued to serve the university for generations.

Now, as a testament to this revealed truth about the presence and vital contributions of enslaved workers and their families to the university, a Memorial to Enslaved Laborers is being constructed at UVA. Its design and location reflect the significant input gathered over the course of a year from students, faculty, and, most significantly, community residents and descendants. The university writes:

Since the University of Virginia’s founding, the belief that inquiry and knowledge are essential to a thriving democracy has stood at its core. This focus has continually led us to seek new challenges, break through barriers, and pursue uncharted paths. Today, we are leading the nation in deepening our understanding of the role of enslaved laborers in building our country and its institutions—including this University.

…The memorial acknowledges and honors the 4,000 or more individuals who built and maintained the University. In addition to clearing land, digging foundations, fetching water, chopping and stacking wood, cleaning, and completing daily chores for students and professors, they engaged in highly skilled labor—including cooking, molding and firing brick, complex carpentry work, roofing, transporting and carving quarried stone, blacksmithing, and making clothing, All these men, women, and children lived with dignity, resisted oppression, and aspired for freedom.

For more than four decades, the entire University was a site of enslavement. Now, we’re confronting our past, uncovering new knowledge, and using that knowledge to teach, heal, and shape the future (Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, n.d.).

A memorial is a significant step, but much more is needed. Many are asking how the university might become a better neighbor and supportive partner to our community. How can faculty and students, with our invisible knapsacks of privilege (McIntosh 2019), support the community in an authentic, win-win way without causing harm through unwitting or unintended manifestations of our academic privilege? Closely tied to this is an equally important acknowledgment of the university’s need to learn to engage with the community in new ways that support equity and community agency.

The University’s new president, Jim Ryan, articulates in his draft strategic plan of June 2019 that UVA will “be a strong partner with and good neighbor to the Charlottesville region...we will work side by side with our neighbors to help ensure that the Charlottesville region is among the best and most equitable places to live, work, and study…with humility and respect, and with the ultimate goal of creating a general sense that we are all part of the same community.” Use of the words “partner,” “neighbor,” and “same community” are all important signals of a significant shift in the university’s desired relationship with the community.

In a separate goal, Ryan specifically calls for a key initiative called “A Good Neighbor Program,” that will “work toward being a just and sustainable community. We will work collaboratively, and with all due humility, with our community partners to address key challenges, including housing, living wages, local educational opportunities, and access to health care. We will set ambitious sustainability goals and develop a realistic plan to meet them, including an improved transportation system. To make it easier for our neighbors to interact with the University, we will create a community engagement office in an easily accessible location in town” (University of Virginia n.d.).

If this initiative is implemented, it is likely a landmark event, signaling a turn outward by Virginia’s leading public university toward service to and partnership with its community. It also signals a possible new interest in supporting student work on community issues through their coursework. As the university begins to become more outward facing, and shifts away from the centuries-old town-gown relationship to one of “good neighbors,” there will be a need for a new “good neighbor” framework for community engagement in the classroom. And, it will be imperative for this community engagement to be carefully designed for mutual benefit, not to further the university’s reputation as an “extractive industry,” but to develop new relationships through equitable engagement.

For those of us teaching and working in food systems planning and urban agriculture, where so many of the core inequities we are now trying to address are the results of misguided community planning philosophies and beliefs, we must ask: Can we create bridges with our neighbors that address these historic inequities? Can we use the resources of the academy— technical knowledge, technology, skills, and student research labor—as a force for good, to build equity in our community?

We believe the answer to these questions is a conditional “yes.” Of all the courses that might be taught at a university, food systems planning is surely one of the classrooms where incorporating community engagement makes the most sense. To ensure that students have more than an academic understanding of food systems and are equipped to enter the “real world” by knowing how to work their way through real, complex situations, it would be a logical aspiration for students to learn through “service learning” research projects that support the needs of community urban agriculture organizations. But how this student work with community is designed, how the community is engaged, is fraught with landmines that are usually invisible to most members of the privileged academy.

So, yes, while we can teach our food systems and urban agriculture students through “service learning” research projects with our neighbors, it is not an easy proposition to ensure that this interaction, at a minimum, will not perpetrate existing inequities and, at best, will eventually increase equity.

2 A New Framework for Teaching Urban Agriculture: Equitable Engagement Through the Classroom

Against this backdrop, the two scenarios described at the beginning of this chapter are a logical manifestation of the longstanding dynamic between UVA and Charlottesville. But in as much as they reflect a frustration with the status quo, they also reflect an opportunity for change.

Through the remainder of this chapter we explore ways that university faculty and community might work together to create a new, healthier dynamic. Particularly, we will explore best practices for faculty and students, who represent a long legacy of institutional privilege and entitlement (even if they do not feel individually privileged or entitled), and how they might become ambassadors for nurturing a new kind of relationship with community that offers mutual respect and benefit.

The already complex proposition of equitable engagement is rendered far more challenging because the principles for equitable engagement are in tension, if not at direct odds, with the twin classroom goals of: (a) providing service to the community in the form of something that is meaningful to and valued by the community, and (b) creating a learning environment where students can deepen their knowledge of urban agriculture, and of food systems planning, while applying this knowledge to this “something” that is meaningful to and valued by the community.

2.1 A Case Study: Incorporating Community Engagement into a Food System Planning Class

The UVA food system planning class, a brainchild of Timothy Beatley, Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities at the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning (Department) in the UVA School of Architecture, was launched in collaboration with Denckla Cobb in 2006 (Mendes et al. 2011). It came on the heels of discussions about how national leaders in the planning field—Jerry Kaufman, Kami Pothukuchi, Marcia Caton Campbell—were all putting food back on the table of urban planning. Beatley’s interest in developing this course grew out of his interest in how food and agriculture are essential elements of sustainable communities. Because agriculture is Virginia’s largest private industry, accounting for an economic impact of $70 billion annually (“Agriculture Facts and Figures” n.d.), Beatley felt that Virginia had the potential to benefit from, and be a leader in, food systems planning. Denckla Cobb worked with Beatley to shape the course into a “planning applications” class (PLAC). As a public policy facilitator and mediator, Denckla Cobb wanted the class to have an impact, to do something useful and helpful to support the surrounding community. At the time, most PLACs involved asking students to apply theory to practice through projects they would likely face in the real world or real situations that had already been concluded and whose outcome was known. The idea that students would work on a real or “live” issue in the local community was still a relatively new idea, but both Beatley and Denckla Cobb felt it was important and doable.

The class was taught for eight years, jointly for the first several years, and the remainder by just Denckla Cobb. Through these years the pedagogical approach and philosophy of engagement evolved significantly, and has given us a platform for developing a new understanding and framework for equitable pedagogy.

In the first class, one of the first shifts in pedagogical approach was to focus student work on a real issue of potential import to the community: developing a regional food system assessment. But engagement with community still occurred in a manner typical of university pedagogy, e.g., with community speakers invited to join students in the classroom, and students encouraged to reach out to appropriate experts and organizations in the community. No effort was made to train students in community engagement, nor was the community consulted on the merit of conducting a food system assessment. However, a second innovation in pedagogical approach occurred at the end of the class, when Beatley and Denckla Cobb decided that students should present their findings to the community, not on campus but in the heart of the community. Both of these would demonstrate the most rudimentary category of community engagement – INFORM – as outlined by the International Association of Public Participation (IAP2) (Fig. 25.1).

Fig. 25.1
A table with 5 columns and 2 rows. The column headers read inform, consult, involve, collaborate, and empower. An arrow from inform to empower reads increasing impact on the decision. The row headers read public participation goal and promise to the public.

IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation. (Reprinted with permission of International Association for Public Participation)

Full size image

These two pedagogical innovations were small but important. Community participants seemed genuinely surprised and grateful, on several counts. It was not necessarily a surprise that a university class would conduct an assessment about some aspect of the community for pedagogical purposes, but at the time it was a big surprise and highly irregular for the university to willingly share its findings and results. Even more irregular was for the presentation to occur off-campus, in the community, for the community, at a location that was easy for the community to access.

But an even bigger surprise came when community participants asked, “What’s next? How do we move this forward? We should keep meeting to figure out what to do next.” Participants were motivated to use the information gathered by students to begin making their regional food system more intentional and sustainable. Though it would not typically be a surprise that community members would want to solve their problems, because of the long history of community distrust of the university, it was unusual for this question to be directed at university faculty, as it signaled a new level of trust and interest in partnership. Both Beatley and Denckla Cobb were excited by this outcome, and knew the student work had struck a chord. What’s more, students were motivated and excited to take on a project that might prove useful to the community, and were proud and also surprised by the community response to their work. Students were learning that they could make a difference while at the university; they didn’t have to be isolated in the “ivory tower” while gaining knowledge and then re-enter the real world after earning their degree. The process of learning could benefit both students and community.

For Denckla Cobb, the community and student response demonstrated two things: how rare this pedagogical experience was for both community and students, and how powerful it could be as a way to educate students while also providing service to community. If Beatley and Denckla Cobb had followed the classic pedagogical formula, they would have continued to teach the same course, year after year, i.e., assign students to conduct a food system assessment of the same, or perhaps a different nearby region. Instead, with some trepidation, they agreed to move the class into a second step of food systems planning by identifying and developing ideas for policies for community consideration. This required adjusting the syllabus, speakers, readings, and methods of student project work.

When they met with similar success and responses from both community and students in the second year, they were motivated to create yet one more iteration of the class to focus on global-local (“glocal”) connections. In this class, students examined how local food production, processing, and distribution, was dependent on the global supply chain and to identify areas where it might be made more sustainable. Again, this required adjusting the syllabus, speakers, readings, and methods of student project work. Although students and community both responded positively to this “glocal” focus, it was clear to both Beatley and Denckla Cobb that the outcomes were less compelling or useful to the community. At this point, after discussing possible next steps, the instructors agreed that a course cycling between assessment and policies, and maybe an occasional “glocal” focus, might be the best path forward. When Beatley withdrew from the course because of assuming other responsibilities, Denckla Cobb remained committed to teaching a class that would have real impact.

Slowly, as the class evolved, so did the methods for community engagement. Denckla Cobb would meet in the fall with community partners to identify specific community “clients” for the class project, to help shape the student project, and to also identify key contacts for the students to work with or interview during the spring class. Projects included developing benchmarks for a sustainable food system; developing and conducting a Food Policy Audit (O’Brien and Denckla Cobb 2012) for Charlottesville; investigating specific issues around land availability, food access, public routes of transportation and access, farm labor, and GIS mapping; food heritage and policies to support local food heritage; farmers market research;Footnote 3 and developing and conducting a Food Justice Audit for Charlottesville.

For the students, who were drawn from all disciplines and levels across the university as well as planning graduate students, the class was a clear success. At the time, planning studios were known as “application courses” and, while they focused on real community issues, did not yet routinely incorporate either service or engagement. To these authors’ knowledge, the first planning applications course at our university to do this was one focused on green infrastructure planning, and it was the immediate success of this model that had emboldened Beatley and Denckla Cobb to follow suit. Every year students were excited and challenged by the food systems planning course and at least one would share how the class had changed their career course. Many have gone to work in the food system, and some are now teaching food systems courses themselves at the university level. In their final essay, many would say this course was the most significant and inspiring of their college courses because of working on a real issue with the community, or because of learning how to do research that had impact. In other words, what differentiated this classroom experience from others, making it more compelling, memorable, and transformative, was the community engagement.

But was this university-based community engagement equitable? It had benefited the students, and thus the university, but was it bringing equal benefits to the community? If it was helping students gain knowledge, skills, and insights into applying theory to practice, was it helping to improve the lives of people in the community?

That was far harder to answer. Student presentations of their findings were always held in the community and were warmly received by the “grasstops” organizational leaders. Rarely did “grassroots” individuals attend, suggesting that little if any benefit might have been felt by them. So, while Kaufman and others put food back on the planning table, if we were not advancing equitable engagement through our student research then we likely were perpetuating—and continuing to recreate—systems of unequal access and inequality in our food system. For example, most of the research conducted by university students and faculty made strategic partnerships with grasstops leaders in Charlottesville. Due to these collaborations, knowledge generated by UVA student researchers and faculty oftentimes amassed within the upper tier of community leaders. This knowledge hardly ever trickled down to grassroots community members, therefore cultivating larger informational voids about local food systems planning. While it may be important for the university to begin working with the grasstops to build understanding and trust, if there is no effort to work directly with grassroots community members then university faculty are doing two things: creating an alignment between the tops and the university that may actually undermine trust between the tops and roots, and also continuing to marginalize the voices that need to be heard and whose agency needs to be supported.

3 Understanding Equity in the Context of University Pedagogy

How can a university classroom advance equity in the community? What does equity look like in practice? How does it manifest in a university pedagogy and engagement? In trying to answer these questions around equity, Bingham draws on her experience, while a master’s student in public health, of bridging the divide in setting up a gardening outreach program called “Growing for Change” in a low-income public housing neighborhood. Bingham also draws upon her subsequent work experience as program director for the Charlottesville Food Justice Network and outreach coordinator for the City Schoolyard Garden.

Grassroots Partnering

Growing for Change (GFC) started in 2015 as an urban garden initiative created to host collaboration between UVA and the Westhaven public housingcommunity in Charlottesville. The initiative worked across disciplines within the University (Public Health Sciences, Global Sustainability, and School of Architecture) and collaboratively alongside public housing residents and key community organizations, such as City of Promise, City Schoolyard Garden, and the Public Housing Association of Residents (PHAR), to design and implement individual gardens. During its first year, GFC engaged 18 families and over 50 students in a co-design process for garden envisioning and production. Key to GFC’s success was a two-tiered engagement approach for partnering with grassroots community organizations and student volunteers. This two-tiered approach enhanced grassroots ownership over the process while working to equip student volunteers with understanding of town-gown relationships.

Under the leadership of the PHAR, GFC drafted a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that laid out clear partnership guidelines and expectations. This MOU was drafted in collaboration with the PHAR Board over the course of three months. The three-month deliberation allowed for participating MOU parties to not only discuss responsibilities, but also to outline clear benefits for the community as well as mutual goals they would achieve together.

The purpose of this MOU is to define PHAR’s role as an advisory board for Growing for Change and their projects in Charlottesville public housing communities. PHAR will also serve as a liaison between GFC and the Charlottesville Housing Authority. In addition, PHAR will ensure that GFC is familiar with resident rights and bylaws, including lease agreements, as well as notify Growing for Change of any updates or additions to these policies that may relate to their work. PHAR will also act as a mediator should any misunderstandings or disputes that arise between GFC and residents.

GFC will support the cultivation of a healthy environment for residents through co-designing and implementing individual gardens. GFC will attempt to meet the desired vision of individual, self-maintained gardens for public housing residents who are willingly engaged with the initiative. In addition, GFC will support PHAR’s Positive Vision for Redevelopment, specifically residents’ right to access green spaces in their communities. (Emphasis added)

During GFC’s first year, the concept of the MOU was brought forth by the paid community liaison, who was compensated by a project-based stipend for up to 10 hours of work per week.

Student Engagement

Student volunteers who engaged with GFC were first required to take an educational workshop on town-gown relationships. These workshops were developed by a group of students from professor Frank Dukes’s Collaborative Planning for Sustainability class in the fall semester of 2015. The town-gown educational workshops included a short documentary film on the history of Vinegar Hill, “That World Is Gone: Race and Displacement in a Southern Town,” by Field Studio, readings and discussion on the University and Community Action for Racial Equity (UCARE) report created by the University of Virginia UCARE Steering Committee, and orientations to participatory co-design created by GFC project directors with supervision from Urban and Environmental Planning professor Barbara Brown Wilson.

The Participatory Co-Designing Guide and Materials packet included 3 activities:

  1. 1.

    Exploring spaces together. During this activity the residents and students would explore the resident’s front and backyard for a potential location of the garden. The resident would lead the process with a disposable camera and take photos of spaces they liked, didn’t like or saw potential in.

  2. 2.

    Bringing ideas to life using model kits. Students and residents would start the conversation about what the garden can potentially look like using a matrix chart with images of different types of gardens feasible to be built and hopefully would get inspired to draw or model their future garden.

  3. 3.

    Drawing a diagrammatic plan of the garden. This activity was made for students to record the final design with the resident including the dimensions, type of garden, any special needs or requests, and what plants would be grown in it.

Small groups of student volunteers (3-4) were matched with 1-2 Westhaven families and were given the tools to engage with the families after completing the educational workshops. GFC project directors initiated weekly community visits on Sunday afternoons to start the initial meetings during which the students and families got to know one another. After that the students scheduled and met with the residents during more convenient times for both parties.

These experiences suggest that equitable engagement must be rooted in the people, the grassroots and neighborhoods, not the dominant white structure of privilege that typifies grasstops organizations. For low-income neighborhood residents and their organizational representatives, however, being treated as the university petri dish year after year, can create a source of ill-will and resentment toward the university. In Charlottesville, residents of color often express that they feel used—not served by the university. From their perspective, the university comes back to them and their neighbors, time and again, with the same questions, yet nothing changes. No systemic interventions by the university have changed the inequities experienced by them or their neighbors. In some cases, their circumstances have worsened over the years, even as they continue to be studied. Residents say they are tired of answering questions, and never receiving benefit from these questions. Why should they be part of a university research design if nothing has happened in the past five years that helps them improve their lives? These sentiments may be further sharpened by the fact that these residents are often working as cleaning, dining, and maintenance personnel at the university for less than a living wage (Hester 2019).

Based on these experiences, often very personal and intense, Bingham believes that equity implies friends and family, sitting on someone’s porch and getting to know them as people, not as objects of information. Drawing on the principles of “participant observation” in anthropology, equity implies action at the individual human level, as opposed to “giving back” or “service,” which comes from a place of privilege. Service might be welcomed by the grasstops, because it provides important sweat equity for a particular project. But for low-income residents who would need to see some longer-term benefit for the engagement to be considered a step towards improving their equity, the idea that they would be the object of “service” or “giving back” is offensive. The “giving back” relationship by students only serves to perpetrate the us-them, town-gown, privileged-underprivileged dichotomy of worldviews that does not heal but furthers the perception of inequity. Putting these together, equity means developing relationships, more than giving back or service or obtaining ideas and knowledge. And developing a relationship suggests the need for a stretch of time spanning at least an academic year, not just one semester.

In exploring emerging best practices for community engagement, Bingham challenges some of the current wisdom. For example, from an equity perspective, the concept of identifying elders or other community members to be interviewed by students is fundamentally flawed if it does not create space in the university world for paid positions as “community instructors.” Instead, the act replicates historical traditions of extraction from the community while leaving current conditions of economic inequity in place. For example, a neighborhood leader who is now in her seventies is a constant source of research guidance and classroom engagement, but still spends her evenings cleaning for the University Credit Union. While compensation for a grassroots community member’s time is now considered a “best practice,” compensation is not fixed, and oftentimes is sporadic over the course of a semester. Therefore, compensation may provide minimal temporary assistance to the individual, but does not help effectuate systemic change towards equity.

Furthermore, in the current power structure, ways to advance equity in our food system while collaborating with marginalized low-income communities of color may be limited, due to financial stress imposing pressure on people’s freedom of choice. If a person actually needs the money, for food or other day-to-day needs, there is not an easy way them to be able to say “no.” So how can this be a real choice, and if there is no real choice, how can this engagement be deemed equitable? Ideally, this community member should be compensated in a way that actually is meaningful to changing her life, to advancing the equity in her life. Such was the case in Growing for Change, when semester stipends were offered to community members for their ongoing support. This approach provided a pipeline for community feedback as residents had a key personnel contact with whom to file grievances should engagement falter. In return, the community members offered mediation support and guidance strengthening the university’s ability to work long-term in an over-researched community. Without carving a place at the table for community instructors, community members’ lives will not change by virtue of sharing knowledge through decades of serving as a reliable go-to “sources” for university officials, professors, and students.

Applying an equity lens to pedagogy means opening a pathway for the grassroots community to be able to navigate the power and privilege that is attached to students and professors. Bingham’s experience in developing Growing for Change, and her lessons learned while a student, lead her to argue that the only way for people to be able to say “no” is if they have established a steady relationship and compensation pipeline. And the only way for this to happen is for the relationship to be built over time, requiring the need for a minimum two-semester span for the course.

This recipe for success is supported by two case studies of community food system interventions, one in a public housing neighborhood in Portland, OR, by Janus Youth Programs, Inc., and another in Lynchburg, VA, by Lynchburg Grows. Denckla Cobb and Jones (Beatley et al. 2018) contend that the conditions for success of these food system interventions “are not about the gardens, per se, but are about creating a space for the community to have a conversation about its hopes and dreams and then facilitating pathways for the community to make its dreams real.” Change agents in both case studies were careful observers, listening to what mattered to community members, never imposing solutions from without, but realizing “greater success through a facilitative approach of listening, observing, empowering residents to make decisions and create their own visions, and then bringing resources to the table” (Beatley et al. 2018). None of the transformative systemic changes for equity in Portland’s public housing neighborhood or in Lynchburg happened overnight. The successes in both cases took careful relationship building with both the grasstops organizational leaders and grassroots neighborhood residents.

These are big concepts that present significant pedagogical challenges. Even the most well-intentioned faculty would be challenged to design a one-semester class that meets this bar for equity. Yet, of all university faculty, it is those who teach food systems and urban agriculture courses who most need to pave this way, as food lies at the heart of a community’s identity and resilience, revealing its level of compassion, care, and inclusion. Food systems and urban agriculture pedagogy needs to pave the way in addressing the hard reality that a typical university class engagement, though grounded in good intentions of bridging the divide, can paradoxically create goodwill among the grasstops leaders, while, at the same time, yield unintended consequences at the grassroots that only reinforce the divide.

4 Preparing Students for Community Engagement

The recipe for equitable engagement, outlined above, pushes us to explore new ideas and models for classroom engagement with community. How might a university class go about implementing this level of equitable engagement? In exploring the options, it is helpful to reflect first on the specific mechanisms that the UVA food systems class used to prepare students for engaging with community partners.

Above all, the class sought to prepare students to become more knowledgeable about the evolving professional ethics for community engagement. This meant shifting the student mindset from one of needing to come up with “answers” or “recommendations” for their papers, to a more facilitative mindset of careful observation and listening to discern community interests and needs, through discussion and student training in listening and qualitative interviews. It also meant increasing student awareness of how the historical traumas caused by the university and a culture of white supremacy continue to manifest in stark disparities in jobs, wages, housing, and health, through guest speakers and readings. To teach students best practices for community engagement, students would work through a case study with the instructor on how to apply the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) Core Values (Fig. 25.2).

Fig. 25.2
A text box titled core values. The core values are affected individuals will be involved in decision making, public contribution influences decision, participation leads to sustainable decisions, inputs from participants, information sharing, and communication with participants.

IAP2 Core Values. (Reprinted with permission of International Association for Public Participation)

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To help students be better prepared to handle community questions and comments about the “Plantation on the Hill,” students would role-play specific scenarios with coaching. Last, to help students learn how to communicate more professionally and respectfully—meaning how to avoid coming across as privileged, clueless students—they would review and rewrite an email that had been sent by a previous doctoral student to a community member, who had then complained to the Provost because of the appalling lack of respect that it demonstrated. This exercise helped students understand how to manifest respect in written communication, from the choice of email salutation (“Dear Ms. X” versus “Hi”), to describing the project, to requesting an opportunity to meet in a way that emphasizes that the choice is the community member’s, at their convenience, and on their turf. To codify all of these learnings, students were asked to jointly create a “best practices” for engaging with the community that the class wanted to uphold during their work. Finally, students were told that all of their final work—whether papers, videos, or PowerPoint presentations—would be made public, and that they would be responsible for personally emailing and sharing their final reports to each community member who was part of their engagement or research work.

Despite all of this training, preparation, and awareness building, the biggest and most consistent challenges food system students faced revolved around the element of community engagement. Overall, older graduate students who had come back to school after working for several years seemed able to grasp and execute the concepts of community engagement fairly well. Those who had the most difficulty, however, were undergraduate or graduate students who had never taken a year off to work and had not developed an ethic of professionalism.

Several lessons might be derived from this food systems class experience. First, in looking back, perhaps the single most important element missing from the training was explicit recognition of the “invisible knapsack” of academic privilege that students carry with them into the community (McIntosh 2019). Students see through their own lens of their own individual story, and believe naively that they will be seen and treated as individuals by the community member, just as they believe they will see and treat the community member. It is a shock to their system when they are not treated as individuals, but are seen as a representative of the white privilege “Plantation on the Hill.” Just as a low-income white student was offended by a community member’s implicit assumption that she came from a wealthy, privileged background, an African-American student was offended when berated for doing “white work” in seeking to elevate history and oral stories about sites of African-American food heritage in the community. Similarly, members of the community were surely offended by student assumptions and stereotypes that manifested in ways of which students were completely unaware. This points to a need for raising student awareness about their roles as “ambassadors” for the university. Just as much as gender, skin color, religion, age, or accent can influence how one is perceived, students need to understand that their very place at the university influences how they will be perceived by community members.

A second lesson from this case study is the need for faculty to distinguish in their design of community engagement between working with community “grasstops” organizational leaders, and working with “grassroots” individuals. It is this distinction that helps to explain how community grasstops partners might respond positively to the opportunity for student assistance on specific issues, while grassroots individuals might be skeptical, resentful, or even both offended and offensive. The grasstops might welcome the opportunity to work with a class, while the grassroots might feel it is just one more manifestation of the university’s “extraction industry.”

A third lesson from this case study is that, while students may have been positively affected individually by their experiences, long-term systemic change to advance community food equity was not a clear outcome. Yes, the class findings were always community-based—e.g., policies, ideas, and recommendations that had been elicited from community members to advance food equity—and student presentations at the end of the year—were warmly received. But the classwork did not yield a sense of advancing food equity systemically. The Charlottesville local food system was growing and thriving in every way possible, but no changes were made to the comprehensive plan, neighborhood plans, zoning, economic development incentives, or transportation system.

Now, looking back, it is possible to see that Denckla Cobb’s food system class undertook the food system assessments and policy work before the community was mobilized. In this way, it surfaces a key missing step of intentionality in university-community engagement. One year after the last food system planning class was offered, in 2015 the Charlottesville Food Justice Network (CFJN) formed and began mobilizing other service organizations and community leadership around food system change. Through increased funding CFJN began building a foundation to cultivate grassroots leadership with programs that create paid community grassroots and student Food Equity Fellows who are working on specific issues and needs, building on Bingham’s previous equity approach in Growing for Change of using paid fellowship positions for community members. Creating a collaborative network between the grasstops and grassroots, the CFJN collaboration opened up avenues with City Departments, eventually leading to the CFJN’s broadly supported Food Equity Initiative, presented to City Council in 2018, and later leading in 2019 to being awarded a USDA grant of $275,000 to advance food access and equity in Charlottesville. In other words, without an intention to create the grassroots support for change – to work over time with the grassroots to build legitimacy and credibility for policy initiatives – it was not possible for the class research to catalyze change at the level of city policy.

That these changes have taken time and engagement of the grassroots reflects the caution that efforts to advance food system equity requires both the grasstops and grassroots, working together.

This experience suggests that, without an intention of supporting community agency at all levels, working with both grasstops and grassroots, a university engagement class may contribute to community agency and knowledge, but only at the grasstops level, thereby failing to catalyze real change for community members. In other words, if a class works with the grasstops, this may advance equity over the long-term by providing the grasstops with research that will help them make their case for new policies. But it may not do anything to bridge the real divide between university and community, which remains at the grassroots. If a class seeks to advance equity and bridge the university-community divide to heal legacies of harm, the faculty and class would need to engage in some manner with the grassroots.

For the food systems classroom, these lessons suggest a clear need for the food systems faculty member to clarify her intentions at the outset: What are the goals for the class? If one goal is for students to engage with community to advance food system equity, then faculty should consider at what level: grasstops and/or grassroots. The model described above of equitable engagement suggests that food systems (or urban agriculture) faculty must work with the community to obtain the answer. If we seek to support our community partners in ways that would be helpful to advancing urban agriculture and food system equity, then grasstops organizational leaders should define what would be most helpful to their efforts. If the grasstops would like student assistance with classic planning course work, such as researching policies on specific urban agriculture issues, researching language for the comprehensive plan, mapping different elements of the food system, conducting windshield observation studies, developing case studies, applying GIS mapping, and so on, then a more classic form of community engagement would be appropriate for the students.

If, on the other hand, grasstops organizations believe it would be helpful for students to engage with grassroots individuals in different neighborhoods, businesses, or services, with one of the goals being to help bridge the university-community divide and build relationships to advance equity at a more individual level, then a very different form of community engagement will be needed.

Whichever path is chosen, community engagement by a university class will have specific constraints that should be considered in the engagement design. We next explore how existing professional guidelines for community engagement may be adapted for the unique circumstances of the university classroom.

5 The Inherent Challenge of Equitable Pedagogy

Based on our experience in designing and facilitating community engagement, and comparing it with the community engagement that occurs through the classroom and student projects, it is important to draw clear distinctions between the two. In some respects, equitable pedagogy is fundamentally more complex. While community engagement has one clear goal, to serve the best interests of the community, equitable pedagogy must always manifest the multiple goals of serving both the university and its students, while also serving the community.

We distinguish between an academic course on community engagement and a course that uses community engagement as a pedagogical tool. In the former, students would be expected to at a minimum to gain competency in the best practices for community engagement and to apply these best practices through designing an engagement process. But in the latter, students also would be expected to implement their design, complete their research project on a tight timeline, and shape and deliver findings in ways that are easily communicated to the community. The challenge with this model is that students are still learning and not yet professionals, and need a “safe space” where they can stretch, explore, and make mistakes.

In developing a new framework for equitable pedagogy, we believe that at a bare minimum, a pedagogical goal for a university class using community engagement should be that the community must financially benefit from this student engagement and co-own knowledge production. It is no longer acceptable for a university to treat a community as an “extractive resource” to teach students and gain knowledge without any clear benefits experienced by the community. If best practices are followed, then the community should drive and contribute to the project design and knowledge production, to ensure that the community is truly getting what it needs, benefitting from the interaction, and owning the results. This, in turn, suggests that the instructor needs to dedicate additional time to working with the community well before the class begins, to create a clear intention for the class impacts, and to have the community identify what would be most helpful.

Though these ideas may be new in the context of academia, these principles have been embodied in community based participatory research (CBPR) and widely used in the field of public health since the turn of the twenty-first century. With theoretical roots that date back to work in the 1930s by Kurt Lewin and Paulo Freire, CBPR came into its own six decades later when, in 1997, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) identified CBPR as one of eight new areas in public health education, and also recommended that the Centers for Disease Control’s Prevention Research Centers (PRCs) could improve their effectiveness by incorporating into their research a “second phase that involves research and dissemination projects that are jointly planned and produced with community partners who have joint ownership of the program” (Faridi et al. 2007). Reviews of CBPR have shown great variation in methodologies [Faridi], but the central principle is consistent. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Health Scholars Program defined CBPR in 2007 as a

collaborative approach to research that equitably involves all partners in the research process and recognizes the unique strengths that each brings. CBPR begins with a research topic of importance to the community and has the aim of combining knowledge with action and achieving social change to improve health outcomes and eliminate health disparities. [Faridi]

Four years later, as an example of how CBPR was becoming mainstream in public health, the Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Center at the University of Michigan School of Public Health adopted eight principles for CBPR, the first of which states that “CBPR promotes collaborative and equitable partnerships in all research phases and involves an empowering and power-sharing process.” The remaining seven principles cover issues such as community identify, co-learning, asset-based approach, mutual benefits, and long-term commitment (Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Center n.d.).

But these principles remain on the fringes of research in other university disciplines, and have not yet become the “norm” for university class engagement with community. Because both food systems and urban agriculture are closely linked to public health, these disciplines provide a natural bridge for public health research norms to be translated into new norms for equitable pedagogy in the arts and sciences.

If academic credit were not at stake, one way to facilitate this community-centered equitable engagement could be a recent innovation at UVA in which a few select students are funded by the university to serve as Food Equity Fellows working for and under the direction of the Charlottesville Food Justice Network. But this approach is not feasible (currently) as a course for academic credit, as students would need to be also work under the supervision of an instructor who provides theoretical and academic context for the community engagement project work. This is the inherent challenge in equitable pedagogy. So, the challenge is how to reconcile the goals of university-based community-centered equitable engagement—serving both our students and our community neighbors—which are in tension and sometimes even at complete odds with each other. Perhaps this is why so few instructors incorporate community engagement into their course work; teaching is hard enough, without adding these additional complications. Nevertheless, we believe it is possible, desirable, and achievable, if a few clear guidelines are followed.

6 New Framework for Equitable Pedagogy

In the search for a win-win pathway, we sought to stake out a middle ground for equitable pedagogy that meets the needs of both university and community. We first looked at best practices for community engagement, established over decades of experience, to explore if they could be adapted to the pedagogical needs of a university course which also needs to educate and provide space for student learning. Could we adapt these best practices to ensure that the community does not feel used, abused, or, in the case of Charlottesville, retraumatized by the “Plantation on the Hill”?

In 1995, Innes proposed a theory of “Communicative Action and Interactive Practice” in which planning theorists “pursue the questions and puzzles that arise in their study of practice, rather than those which emerge from thinking about how planning could or should be” (Innes 1995). The questions and puzzles that have arisen through the years in planning, community engagement, and collaborative planning, have led to a robust set of guidelines for how planners and other professionals may undertake and design community engagement with integrity.

We may be at a similar turning point with equitable pedagogy. That is, rather than seeking answers from theory, it is time for us to draw from the lessons of our practice and experience in Charlottesville to develop a new framework for university-based community-centered engagement.

One possible guidepost for this new framework is described by our colleague, Barbara Brown Wilson, Assistant Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning, in her book Resilience for All: Striving for Equity Through Community-Driven Design. Opening her book by blasting traditional community engagement, she writes that “many traditional methods of community engagement are useless to vulnerable communities” (Wilson 2018). Wilson observes that “consultation does not necessarily help create more equitable communities,” and goes on to argue that “equitable, systemic change in vulnerable communities involves fusing the local knowledge of residents with technical knowledge of professionals in small, nimble public projects.”

Although students are not yet professionals, they crave high-impact experiences and gravitate to courses where they will grapple with real-life issues. So finding a way to apply Wilson’s formula to the classroom could be the foundation for a possible win-win. This is not as easy as it may sound. If a food systems class were to work on an issue of importance—identified by the community—and were to “fuse local knowledge” with their food system planning skills in a small, nimble project—designed by or with key community members—then the classroom might become a viable avenue for supporting community equity. At the same time, this model would enable students to grapple with real-life issues, grow skills in applying theory to practice, and gain competencies in problem-solving, community engagement, and also become ambassadors for the university’s goal to be a good neighbor.

But this model still begs the question: are students working with grasstops or grassroots? If the class is only one semester, relationships with grassroots are just getting formed. Also, if the grasstops are identifying who the class should engage at the grassroots, does this not perpetrate the power dynamic between the tops and roots and undermine authentic class relationships with the roots? These are questions that still need to be resolved in the coming years.

Literature on community engagement has shown, time and again, that engagement is not successful if it is merely for show. The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) adopted in 2002 seven Core Values, after two years of intensive international collaboration. These Core Values insist that for engagement to be successful it must authentically seek community input, communicate to participants what they can or cannot influence, and seek out all those who are impacted or interested.

Wilson’s guidepost advances the notion that, if it is to be meaningful and avoid creating harm to vulnerable communities, community engagement must also be values-driven in seeking equitable, systemic change.

We believe the challenging issues surrounding community engagement design are doubly difficult for faculty, as the ethical principles for equitable engagement may be in tension, if not at direct odds, with faculty goals for the student experience. The goals for classroom engagement with community usually are twofold: (1) provide service to the community in the form of something that is meaningful to and valued by the community, and (2) create a learning environment where students can deepen their knowledge of urban agriculture, and of food systems planning, while applying this knowledge to something that is meaningful to and valued by community.

Yet these goals for classroom engagement are fraught with unseen landmines. Who decides what might be meaningful to and valued by the community? Is it the grasstops organizational leaders, or the grassroots residents who are experiencing the inequities that may need to be addressed? How exactly will the student research be used, by whom, and in what time frame? In other words, classroom engagement needs to be informed not just by best practices for community engagement, but also by best practices that will advance equity.

So, a third layer of consideration relates to our evolving understanding of how engagement might be made more equitable. More specifically, what would equitable engagement look like when applied to the food systems classroom? In dealing with issues of contested spaces and memorials, the UVA Institute for Engagement and Negotiation (IEN) has coined the term “Equitable Collaboration” with a set of six concepts to complement the IAP2 Core Values, for professionals who aspire to address issues of equity through their practice of collaboration (see Fig. 25.3). The IEN argues that collaboration can unwittingly serve to deepen longstanding historical inequities and perpetuate legacies of harm—an outcome that no ethical practitioner would willingly intend or support. IEN is proposing that equitable collaboration must be trauma-informed, truth-seeking, inclusive, responsive, deliberative, and adaptive. These concepts are further explored and explained in IEN’s Transforming Community Spaces website (Institute of Engagement and Negotiation n.d.).

Fig. 25.3
An info-graphic chart titled equitable collaboration is presented. It lists 6 items under it along with their briefs on the left side. A radial diagram titled Trauma Informed is on the right side. Clockwise it is surrounded by inclusive, responsive, truth-seeking, deliberative and effectual.

University of Virginia Institute for Engagement & Negotiation Equitable Collaboration (2019)

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Together, these three frameworks—Wilson’s guidepost, IAP2 Core Values, and IEN’s Equitable Collaboration—provide a useful backdrop for developing a set of best practices for equitable pedagogy that will foster more meaningful and equitable university relationships with community neighbors.

Putting all three frameworks together, we propose that a university food systems class that incorporates community engagement—if it hopes to avoid the inadvertent perpetuation of systemic inequities and legacies of harm—would be driven by the value of advancing systemic, equitable change in the food system; informed and guided by the tested and broadly accepted IAP2 Core Values regarding public participation; and also informed and guided by the IEN best practices for Equitable Collaboration.

7 Proposed Core Principles for University-Based Community-Centered Equitable Engagement

The following set of core principles for university-based, community-centered, equitable engagement reflects the three frameworks discussed above. A food systems planning course is well equipped to test these core principles, as food systems planning has been infused from the beginning by a strong philosophical alignment for equity and effective engagement. We hope these core principles will spark discussion and debate among our colleagues, as well as real change in the design of our university courses to support 21st century hopes and dreams for fully engaged communities with agency to direct their own future.

For food systems and urban agriculture classrooms, this history of community tension with the university research “extractive industry” makes it all the more imperative that faculty approach community engagement by their urban ag students with eyes wide open about the potential downsides—so that they can design the engagement for maximal success for both students and community.

In some communities where “grasstops” organizational leaders and “grassroots” community members are communicating regularly and working well with each other, it may be possible for the urban ag class to engage with just the community grasstops to advance equity. In communities like Charlottesville, however, If one gets out ahead of the other, tensions can erupt and lead to divisions within the low-income communities. So, if a class seeks to advance equity, it may need to engage with both the grasstops organizational and grassroots residents simultaneously, and independently of each other.

University faculty working with the grasstops may assume these organizations are engaging their grassroots and will share the class work with them. But university class engagement with just grasstops organizations may fail to support the meaningful, systemic change desired, because the grassroots may feel left out and their voice not heard. In Charlottesville, for example, not all grasstops organizations automatically work with the grassroots. By working only with grasstops organizations, a class may create unnecessary and counterproductive divisions between grasstops and grassroots; grassroots may see projects that benefit the grasstops organizations as “feel good” examples of university efforts that, once again, do not address the inequities experienced at the grassroots.

Because food systems planning is often centered around issues of equity, this tension between working with the grasstops and grassroots is especially important to understand and inform class engagement. This tension also illustrates the importance for urban agriculture faculty to incorporate the principles of Equitable Collaboration to ensure that the classroom engagement is not only trauma-informed (i.e., informed about place-based history and culture of relationships) but also inclusive, responsive, truth-seeking, deliberative, and efficient (Fig. 25.3).

To guide faculty in designing their food systems course for success, we have develop two tools to help navigate the various considerations outline above: a Decision Tree (Fig. 25.4) that walks faculty systematically through the choices available, and a “Spectrum for Equitable Pedagogy” (Fig. 25.5) that provides our theoretical framework for these choices.

Fig. 25.4
A decision tree. It begins with, do I need or want this food system, which flows to, yes, this is a core goal. This ultimately leads to wait until a two semester course can be taught, decide that systemic change is not feasible and decide to engage in a short term one semester manner.

Decision Tree for Using Equitable Pedagogy

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Fig. 25.5
An info-graphic chart lists the text in 4 sets of 5 circles, under the headers inform, consult, involve, collaborate, and co-create and co-own.

Spectrum of Equitable Pedagogy

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First, faculty must consider: Do I need or want this course to support equitable, systemic change for my community neighbors? If the answer is “no,” and the food systems or urban ag course aims to build an academic foundation for understanding food systems, not for advancing equity, then the course may benefit from field trips and guest speakers but should not include student engagement with community. Student research, in this situation, would consist of standard academic research papers or other deliverables that address the theoretical and historical framework of food systems and urban agriculture.

If faculty do need or want to support equitable systemic change, then the decision tree walks them through a number of considerations, with answers being driven by consultation with the community grasstops about their needs, their desires for inclusion of the grassroots, and by faculty constraints of whether it can be a one or two-semester course. Ideally, the food system faculty works with key community “grasstops” organizational leaders (or another process at higher levels in the university) to identify small, nimble research or service projects achievable within a semester.

To be clear, however, it is not and should never be the community organization’s responsibility to come up with projects for university students, as that is placing a burden on the community for the benefit of the university. Instead, because it is the university that seeks to use community engagement as a tool for both instruction and for advancing urban ag in the community, the burden should be on the university for the benefit of the community. In other words, the instructor’s goal is to ensure that grasstops leaders feel they have benefitted from the class, that it was worthwhile, their time well-spent, and they would welcome continuing engagement with that faculty’s class.

While engagement with community at the grasstops can occur in one semester, meaningful engagement with grassroots for equitable, systemic change has to be part of a longer trajectory, and can only be done successfully over a two-semester period along with a faculty commitment to continue this over multiple years. The engagement would be considered “successful” if and when the engaged grassroots people feel that their issues of equity are heard, seen, and in some way addressed. For this to occur, students need to develop relationships with the grassroots residents, which cannot be done over a short period of time. Recognizing the challenges of this model, faculty may wish to consider creative ways of designing a food systems course that seeks to support equitable, systemic change: perhaps a 3- or 4-credit course could be extended over two semesters; or perhaps two faculty might co-teach a 6-credit, two-semester course together.

As a complement to the decision tree, we have formulated the following core principles and core responsibilities to help guide the food systems instructor in navigating the path toward Equitable Pedagogy. Key strategies are the need to support equitable compensation for community grassroots participants, along with community co-creation and co-ownership of the knowledge (Wainwright et al. 2017).

7.1 Core Faculty Responsibilities for Successful Equitable Pedagogy Include Co-Creation, Co-Ownership, and Equitable Compensation

  1. 1.

    If a faculty wishes to advance food system equity through class engagement with community, the faculty will at least consult the community grasstops about specific needs and small, nimble research projects that might support these goals (co-creation). There needs to be a balance between the ebb and flow of building community relationships, and the faculty may wish to seek a balance between student research and service with the grasstops, while also recognizing that “service” projects with grassroots community members may be seen as offensive. Options for student work might include reviewing policies for the community, developing suggestions for the comprehensive plan based on other policies adopted by similar communities elsewhere, policy audits, or GIS mapping.

  2. 2.

    Following community guidance, if a faculty decides to engage with grassroots, the faculty will work with the grasstops to identify the best ways to communicate and work with the grassroots (co-creation). For example, a faculty may not be aware of ways in which the dominant white culture expresses itself, with implicit contracts for transactions, such as sending requests through emails and expecting responses. Faculty need to learn, and in turn need to educate their students about these implicit contracts and ways in which they will need to engage more equitably with grassroots community members.

  3. 3.

    Faculty establish check-points through the course with the grasstops, and if appropriate with the grassroots, as well as with students, to ensure that community needs and student needs are being met.

  4. 4.

    Faculty find ways to include more complete place-based histories into the curriculum, to ensure that the class and community engagement is trauma-informed.

  5. 5.

    Faculty strive to create a “safe” or “brave space” where community members can be honest and transparent, and where students can learn, make mistakes, be themselves and authentic while also understanding their role as university ambassador. As part of this, faculty need to create time in the course to train students in careful listening and observing, through active listening and accurate note-taking.

  6. 6.

    Faculty seek to implement the community engagement design in a way that is respectful of community members, by being easy, affordable, time-efficient, and non-repetitive.

  7. 7.

    Faculty require students to infuse their technical knowledge and research with community ideas, recommendations, and knowledge in the development of their work for the community project (co-creation and co-ownership).

  8. 8.

    If faculty are able to work with grassroots, then faculty need to provide equitable compensation to the grassroots community members in the form of paid and named positions with the class for the duration of the class. Past forms of compensation, such as gift cards or honoraria, are no longer considered acceptable as they do not provide the level of recognition of community member knowledge in a way that contributes to building community capacity and supports equity for the community members.

  9. 9.

    Faculty include community engagement competency in the grading of student work, to ensure appropriate incentives for following best practices. For example, students could gain or lose points based on specific metrics draw from the IAP2 pertaining to community engagement, such as how effective they were at seeking out and facilitating the involvement of those affected, informing their contacts how their input was or was not used, etc.

  10. 10.

    Faculty will require that student work becomes “open source,” meaning student work is presented to the community with opportunity for questions and discussion, and is provided to the community at the end for its own use (co-ownership). This interrupts the long tradition of universities seeking knowledge from their communities, and treating the community as a research “petri dish” which derives no benefit from the engagement.

8 Conclusion

As legacies of harm are bubbling to the surface, the twenty-first century is offering new opportunities for addressing past traumas and transforming the historically tense town-gown relationship. As an example, the University of Virginia’s commitment to confronting its past has opened a window of opportunity for working with Charlottesville to address legacies of harm and shape a more equitable future. Within the academy, food systems planning and urban agriculture faculty are perfectly positioned to help bridge the university-community divide, as our work often centers on community and equity. Through urban agriculture, food systems faculty can use the resources of the academy—technical knowledge, technology, skills, and student research labor—as a force for good, to advance equity and system change in community.

This goal is challenged by the constraints of the one-semester classroom, along with the lack of adequate guidelines for faculty and students in how to navigate the complex world of community engagement that seeks systemic change to advance equity. The long-established IAP2 Spectrum and Core Values for Public Participation, Wilson’s guidepost for supporting equity and systemic change, and recently developed core principles by IEN for Equitable Collaboration, can be merged and adapted to address the unique circumstances and challenges of the university classroom in undertaking community engagement for advancing equity. Putting all three frameworks together, we propose a new framework for Equitable Pedagogy to guide and support faculty in their efforts to advance community equity through classroom engagement with community, to avoid the inadvertent perpetuation of privilege and systemic inequities, and to help realize a more positive relationship between university and community that is mutually beneficial and synergistic.