Over the course of my ILC entitled “Exploring Anti-Hunger Infrastructure Through Digital Reading” I have explored aspects of anti-hunger infrastructure through a variety of texts read and annotated digitally via hypothis.is. Across eighteen readings from fifteen texts, I was able to gather a multitude of context for issues surrounding anti-hunger infrastructure, as well as being able to create my own definition of not just anti-hunger infrastructure but of effective anti-hunger infrastructure. From this I created my own document defining these issues and using my research to make my suggestions for the creation of and strengthening of anti-hunger infrastructure at the Evergreen State College, which I hope to use to guide both my work and other future food systems work at Evergreen.
I started with readings from Jenea Cohns Skim, Dive, Surface, a book I have been using for the past year and find best to read in the beginning of the quarter. I read through the introduction as well as the chapters curation and connection, and something I noted was the many references to annotation and selective reading-based teaching methods practiced by various mentioned teachers across the world. While I may not use the same terminology, many of my own self-developed practices mirrored methods of these educators, and I was able to adapt some of my own practices using things I enjoyed reading about. One standout was Cohns “Where in the words does this idea go” map-making activity that I used several times when constructing my WordPress posts.
One of the readings from my second week was “From Dirt” by Camille T. Dungy. As she described being able to order a package of heirloom Cherokee seeds for just the price of postage, I annotated “Seeds as a non-textual source of generational knowledge? Seeds can’t be digitized, but the research from them can, what is the seed and what is the learning? The bite and the taste? The meal and the emotion?” I continued to develop this idea as I read through the rest of her work and as I constructed my WordPress reflection, and I especially enjoyed working on the “bite and taste” aspect. This is not yet a fully formed metaphor because I am still struggling to fit all the pieces into place with the idea of seeds and authors, but I keep it in my pocket and continue to take it out and try and figure it out. This does not feel like a loose end to me, this feel like the beginning of years of exploration.
As I progressed further into my ILC I began reading denser research pieces about food insecurity and anti-hunger infrastructure on college campuses. This began the creation of my final document as well as progressed my technical definition of anti-hunger infrastructure, although additional research into social infrastructure as a broader concept and the tangibility of the elements that build infrastructure was also key. Reading “Food Insecurity at Urban Universities: Perspectives During the COVID-19 Pandemic”, a research paper co-published by the Coalition of Urban Serving Universities and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, defiantly provided the most comprehensive context and actionable suggestions for based off student needs, as well as giving me the tools to back up my own definition of effective anti-hunger infrastructure. Not only did this paper look at what students food needs were, but it also evaluated the effect of food insecurity on academics, the social stigma surrounding needing help, and the overall societal and economic changes that have impacted what it means to live as a student in comparison to the changes (or lack of) that colleges have made to adapt to that.
In constructing my final paper “Hungry Greeners: Findings on College Hunger Through Digital Reading and Suggestions for Creation and Re-enforcement of Anti-hunger Infrastructure at the Evergreen State College” I used both my research from this quarter but also mine and other Greeners experiences needing and using food services on campus. This collaboration of sources was needed to make effective solutions but felt informal and left something to be desired. While I am very pleased with this paper and plan to have it looked over and hopefully used to guide further change, I am hoping to conduct a more widespread and comprehensive student survey to get to the true needs of students.
This quarter has given me much to think about as far as campus food security and student needs, as well as the future of my academic projects and endeavors. Being able to develop my own definitions from research and experience has inspired me to do something more public with the theoretical work I have been doing for so many quarters. I am hopeful that more will come from this work as I collaborate with the CCAS and other campus groups to support students facing food insecurity.
For my last week, I read “AN URBAN FARMER’S ALMANAC: A Twenty-First-Century Reflection on Benjamin Banneker’s Almanacs and Other Astronomical Phenomena” by Erin Sharkey and selected chapters from Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I also completed the writing I have been working on and I am really excited about how it turned out.
“The Council of Pecans” – Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
In “The Council of Pecans” Kimmer weaves together stories about her grandfather and the forced relocation of his family with the rise of Indian relocation policies, and the teachings and historical wisdom of pecans. The chapter begins with Krimmer describing how finding pecans came as a saving grace to her grandfather and his brothers mid-summer when fish were scarce. Later in the chapter she discusses how nuts are a high-calorie source of protein highly sought after by many communities preparing for the winter, and how Pecans themselves, in their hard protective casings, are perfect to store for both human and animal survival.
“The boys may have come home fishless, but they brought back nearly as much protein as if they’d had a stringer of catfish. Nuts are like the pan fish of the forest, full of protein and especially fat—“poor man’s meat,” and they were poor. Today we eat them daintily, shelled and toasted, but in the old times they’d boil them up in a porridge. The fat floated to the top like a chicken soup and they skimmed it and stored it as nut butter: good winter food. High in calories and vitamins— everything you needed to sustain life. After all, that’s the whole point of nuts: to provide the embryo with all that is needed to start a new life.”
Kimmer reveals how in just one generation her family was forcibly removed from their homes three times to open up land to white settlers, with their last stop being in Oklahoma. Native tribes were all but forced into accepting citizenship in exchange for a parcel of land further west, with anything the government considered leftover being sold off to colonizers. While this was not covered in the chapter, it’s important to remember that Native tribes did not practice individual ownership of land, believing that one person could not own the earth, and the forced breakup of land from tribal ownership to family by family ownership was a move by the United States Government to reduce land ownership amongst Native tribes. (Suzan Shown Harjo, 2014)
“Butternuts, black walnuts, hickories, and pecans are all closely related members of the same family (Juglandaceae). Our people carried them wherever they migrated, more often in baskets than in pants, though. Pecans today trace the rivers through the prairies, populating fertile bottomlands where people settled.”
I am really hoping to do an ILC on food, life histories, and creating your personal menu. The politics and social atmosphere of the geographical area you live in will hold cultural influence on the food you eat, but what about the histories of the land? What are the ignored signs that land has a deep personal history, how do we preserve and restore what is left? How does the method by which food reached your area affect its literal and metaphorical taste? How does food with a legacy impact the ways in which communities face food insecurity?
“My Haudenosaunee neighbors say that their ancestors were so fond of butternut that they are a good marker of old village sites today. Sure enough, there is a grove of butternuts, uncommon in “wild” forests, on the hill above the spring at my house. I clear the weeds around the young ones every year and slosh a bucket of water on them when the rains are late. Remembering.”
I very much enjoyed Kimmer’s explanation of the Pecan tree and how it sustains itself. The hard shell around a pecan that makes them best for keeping for scarcer seasons also protects some nuts from potential predators, therefore allowing the seed to reproduce. While the trees do not produce fruit every year, if one tree produces, they all do, they are a pack plant. Kimmer highlights how this act of self-preservation benefits both the tree and the living things around it, and how despite extensive study no field of eco-biology has yet determined how exactly these trees are able to evaluate and manage their production. And despite the debate around if plants can “talk”, they are at least capable of acts of self-preservation that act to preserve other species for their own benefit. The trees even seem to be able to determine if there are enough or too many predators to produce fruit!
I don’t want to conclude writing about this chapter without acknowledging the atrocities mentioned in this chapter as they apply to the forced relocation and subsequent genocide of thousands of Native people as well as the kidnapping and inhumane treatment of Native children, all of which was backed by the United States Government. While my annotations mainly pertained to the food and ecological mentions in the chapter, the history of our lands does not extend only to agriculture but to our social histories.
“The Three Sisters” – Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
This chapter highlights the plants known as the three sisters, corn, beans, and squash. Kimmer describes the sound that could be heard over time should you study the collaborative growth of these plants, providing indulgent and calming descriptions of what is repeatedly described as the noise but not the voice, concluding her description with, “These are sounds, but not the story. Plants tell their stories not by what they say, but by what they do.”
Kimmer highlights how plants have the ability to teach universally speaking a language understood by all. Plants teach of food, food that every human being from the beginning to the end of time will require for sustenance. The story of the three sisters reminds me of the Greek myth of Baucis and Philemon, in which Zeus and Hermes provide comfort to the only couple willing to show them kindness. The three sisters are personified in a way in which you can see both them in yourself and yourself in them, and allow for much interesting theoretical work on the relationships between plants and the relationships within people, both amongst our peers and the other life on earth. Each performs a function that benefits both themselves and their sister, much like the cycle of the pecan tree, and the dynamic between them is much like that of a family as Kimmer describes.
“The firstborn girl knows that she is clearly in charge; tall and direct, upright and efficient, she creates the template for everyone else to follow. That’s the corn sister. There’s not room for more than one corn woman in the same house, so the middle sister is likely to adapt in different ways. This bean girl learns to be flexible, adaptable, to find a way around the dominant structure to get the light that she needs. The sweet baby sister is free to choose a different path, as expectations have already been fulfilled.”
Kimmer goes on to talk about how to learned to engage her students in lessons about the three sisters by starting every fall program in the garden to students could see for themselves the collaboration of the three sisters. Here she further personifies the plants, telling the story of a student who grew disgusted upon hearing her favorite squash described as “the ripened ovary of that first flower.”. Kimmer explores the sexual nature of plants and gardens, offering a beautiful yet jarringly sensual description of how she has them open ears of corn that utilizes multiple of her senses. She likens parts of the corn to sperm and ovaries, describing the movement she sees within and referencing its name “the corn mother”.
Kimmer closes the chapter by reflecting on her yearly three sisters’ potluck, giving an idea of the community connection and parallels that relate to these plants. A potluck itself reflects the idea of the three sisters, with each person making something not only for their benefit but for everyone else’s benefit, and the mutual success is based on the trust that everyone will do the same. Kimmer also talks of how the introduction of pesticides and monoculture is counterintuitive to the land and to her communities, acknowledging that while crop-eating pests have always existed, the three sisters’ model of agriculture has far outlived chemical pesticides and survives better without, and instead we should utilize diversified growing practices. She also acknowledges each creature’s need to survive and take from the earth for sustenance, including the bugs.
“The Three Sisters offer us a new metaphor for an emerging relationship between indigenous knowledge and Western science, both of which are rooted in the earth. I think of the corn as traditional ecological knowledge, the physical and spiritual framework that can guide the curious bean of science, which twines like a double helix. The squash creates the ethical habitat for coexistence and mutual flourishing. I envision a time when the intellectual monoculture of science will be replaced with a polyculture of complementary knowledge. And so all may be fed.”
“AN URBAN FARMER’S ALMANAC: A Twenty-First-Century Reflection on Benjamin Banneker’s Almanacs and Other Astronomical Phenomena” by Erin Sharkey
I very much enjoyed this chapter from A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars. Sharkey writing emulates a diary or journal, incorporating her present experiences, memories, and generally reflecting on her beliefs and lines of thought. Each entry is dated and included an italicized line informing the reader of the most fruitful activities for the day, from January 12th’s “Best day to do nothing, to rest. The snow is an unbroken shell. There is quiet industry below. It does not need to be tended. Sleep is its own labor.” to June 10th’s “Best day to string extension cords to your neighbor’s house, to tag your name on the vacant park building, to graft, to pollinate.” These at first seem like simple fun or self-reflection, but as Sharkey begins to explore her religious history and its ties to her present exposure to astrology, you begin to realize each one is connected to the astrological cycles she’s referencing.
I quickly identified with some of Sharkleys background, while my parents weren’t ever particularly religious (an atheist father and an agnostic mother), I grew up in and around church activities. The Bible had a hand in most extra-curriculars and clubs in my English hometown, and so my parents sent us so we wouldn’t be isolated from other kids. As Sharkey says, for much of my young life church activities were something to look forward to with my friends, although I always went home to be reminded they were only stories. The church was the first place that told me my queerness was bad, and my socially progressive parents do their best to support their two queer kids despite not always understanding. As an adult I have always identified as an atheist, though recently I was tasked with identifying spirituality within myself for my Spring 23 class with Kendra. I settled on my houseplants as my spiritual energy, and that feels the closest I have ever gotten to believing in god or any form of extraordinary.
While I do not agree with all of Sharkey’s assessments of the effectiveness and reliability of astrology, I very much enjoyed reading her thoughts and applications of it. Her interview with her parents was particularly interesting to me, and reading about the inclusion and potentially opposite references to stars in the bible made me wonder how many original religious writings could have centered around the existence of stars, the cosmos, or other naturally occurring wonders. While I do agree that there is absolutely an argument to be made that astrology uses patterns to identify useful information that can be timelines, when it reaches a metaphysical level of being able to determine the best day of the month to cut your hair I cannot support that conclusion. Astronomy however is an excellent tool of agricultural work that I feel is often underutalized in its ability to maximize overall global food production.
Sharkey also weaved in stories of the teenagers working the urban farm project, not just their agricultural endeavors but the stories of their lives and how the farm work is connected to or separate from the rest of their world.
“Arica’s parents were like that wild weed. Her mother, holding many responsibilities; her father, wheezing and tired; both ever-present. Wrapped around her as she tried to get off this block with its crumbling sidewalk and slumped houses boarded with plywood, their paint peeling itself away. She carried the molded-pulp berry basket home to share her bounty with them, to share the taste of her first harvest.”
“Antonio always volunteers for chicken coop duty. He likes the quiet. He used to be afraid, but now he pushes their stubborn bodies aside and away from the heat lamp. In a hushed whisper, he reassures the brightly colored hens and thanks them for the warm gift—Easter-hued eggs—their biological instinct. Clucking, though now forgetful and unworried, the birds wander out of the coop and toward the compost pile. The boy knows about duty. At home, he is responsible for getting his sister to the bus after picking out the pieces of her uniform, the khaki pants and navy polo with the charter school logo embroidered on the chest, and brushing her ratty hair, forcing an elastic band around it. He sometimes takes a couple of eggs home and cracks them in a big blue bowl and bathes slices in it to make her French toast, but she drips syrup down her front, so most days the menu is peanut butter toast or cereal.”
“They listen to reggaeton on an old boombox while harvesting green beans, touching the flesh gently and flicking their wrists so the skin won’t bruise. At sixteen, they know that we leave marks where we intersect, know how to carry a bounty of patience. The experience is not lost on them—the slow crawl from tiny seed in the cup of the palm to the painfully slow reach for heaven. Magda is tiny, too. Can get lost for hours with her head low in the beans, palm, snap, palm, snap. But when she is directed to move a pile of earth, she looks even smaller. The handle of the tool barely fits under her chin and her arms spaghetti. She moans and her huffs balloon around her.”
By weaving together all of these elements, this essay presents a series of events and ideas that leave open for questioning the role of religion and spirituality in agriculture, the crossover from the physical to the metaphysical in botany in agriculture, the impact of farming projects on young people living in urban areas, and the impact of religion on young people not idealized by said religion.
This week I also finished my paper “Hungry Greeners: Findings on College Hunger Through Digital Reading and Suggestions for Creation and Re-enforcement of Anti-hunger Infrastructure at the Evergreen State College”. I was incredibly nervous to write this as I find papers and such to be very intimidating, butas I am progressively getting more confident in my writing I want to explore creating useful and one day publishable writings.
This paper provides some background on student hunger in Washington, provides my developed definition of anti-hunger infrastructure, explores current food services on campus, student income statistics published by the college, and puts forwards my proposals for combatting food insecurity and strengthening anti-hunger infrastructure on campus. I am incredibly proud of it and it feels like a very successful final product.
Program outcomes on the Evergreen Organic Farm: An evaluation of nearly two decades of the practice of sustainable agriculture & the practice of organic farming programs at The Evergreen State College by Connor Xavier Murphy
This thesis paper details the model and results of a survey distributed to past and present students taking the Practice of Organic Farming/Practices for Sustainable Agriculture, distributed by Evergreen’s Office of Institutional Research and Assessment (OIRA). Reading the entire paper didn’t feel relevant to my ILC, but after skimming through, searching some key terms, and reading over the table of contents, I selected a few sections from Chapter 3 for context on the survey itself, as well as all of Chapters 4 and 5 which summarize and discuss the results of the survey.
The survey itself asked questions about participants’ experience in and feedback for the POF/PSA program, current industry of employment, personal gardens and food production projects, and personal and working sustainable agriculture practices. It was distributed via email to students who had participated in the program between 2002 and 2021 as part of Connor Xavier Murphys’ Masters in Environmental Studies thesis at Evergreen. After the connections I have made in the past few weeks I was excited to find an Evergreen-focused example of integrating food systems and access into the classroom, especially one that evaluates longer-term impacts.
One of the focuses of the survey was the participants continued level of involvement in the food system. Murphys’ survey showed that 75.4% of respondents worked in farming or gardening after the conclusion of the class and 47.7% held a leadership role. Employment on a farm or garden was not the only measure of involvement in the food system, data collection included involvement in gardening for personal or volunteer purposes.
“Every single respondent indicated, at minimum, a personal level of involvement in the food system. This personal involvement took the shape for some of maintaining a home garden or purchasing food from local growers, for some it involved educating friends and neighbors about sustainable agriculture, and for others it took the shape of political and financial support of groups working to advance sustainable agriculture and food justice goals.”
While a student entering a farming program may be more likely to participate in these kinds of activities than the average student, the classroom integration of food systems correlation to a 100% involvement rate cannot be overlooked. Not only has participation in this program provided education on food systems and community connection in agriculture, but it has also provided continued education and benefits to others in and out of the Evergreen and Olympia community as Amlunmi continue to apply and teach class practices. When highlighting work in food system leadership, survey data showed that 41% of participants had initiated or participated in the creation of a food systems job, further demonstrating the reach of these benefits.
I appreciated that Murphy allowed space for students to give feedback on the farming program, providing valuable insights to where a program like this may or may not be best suited for student needs. In years prior to the report community-based activities in the program had been scaled back dramatically from past years, these included things such as weekly potlucks and extended field trips. This was in part due to students’ ever-increasing need to consolidate their time so as to work or meet family commitments while they are in school, and in part due to a faculty disconnect on why these activities were so necessary to learning.
“These moments of tantamount importance to many students took place between and around the more formal course elements of lectures, labs, and farm visits. Yet, these connections between students, faculty, and staff were responsible for some of the most profound moments that respondents shared. In the modern academic environment, it is becoming more and more difficult to create space for these moments. Students have increasing demands for their time and institutions are ceaselessly wary of liability and they risks inherent in communal living and working.”
Lending time for these activities within academic time is crucial to integrating the feeling of belonging that was talked about in my readings from last week, potlucks especially are the perfect metaphor for creating that sense of trust within a community. While I acknowledge the challenges that come with these activities, community eating and food sharing is necessary, and putting time and funding into supporting these events both in programs and for the greater community should be a priority for the greater Evergreen administration. Murphy put it well in saying “The idea of a community of practice –often touted at Evergreen – is one that is easy to contemplate and imagine, but is often complicated to operationalize.” Community-based learning requires the school to take a community-based operation style.
I want to close my thoughts on Murphys’ paper with this quote I really enjoyed:
“The current moment requires a much larger group of educated food citizens. As one of humanity’s principal activities, agriculture is a primary contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions (Barlett, 2011). The path to change requires more and more people to understand where their food comes from and how it might be produced in a sustainable fashion. Even better, large numbers of citizens could be empowered through an understanding of producing even a small portion of their own food. The generation of Greta Thunberg is coming of age and entering colleges and universities – they will continue to demand access to hands-on agricultural education.”
This week I also started writing my final document which has a working title of “Hungry Greeners: Findings on College Hunger Through Digital Reading and Suggestions for Creation and Re-enforcement of Anti-hunger Infrastructure at the Evergreen State College”. It is still very much a draft but I wanted to share the section on my definition of effective anti-hunger infrastructure.
“To best explore and evaluate anti-hunger infrastructure I must first define what it is. By definition infrastructure refers to the physical and organizational needs for successful operation of something. That something can be tangible or not, but most anything requires a physical infrastructure of some kind, even just for storage or record keeping. When I discuss anti-hunger infrastructure I refer to the social programs, projects, and food systems that allow people to access food. This may be direct access to food such as a food bank or indirect access through resources and support such as SNAP workshops.
The infrastructure of social systems within anti-hunger infrastructure is equally as important as the physical infrastructure of the distribution, it is key that we explore the social and community aspects that influence a students ability to access what is already available and what could be created. Throughout my readings I found many references to a student’s sense of belonging within their student body and its effect on a students willingness to seek out the help they need. Students who are afraid of being labeled “poor” or otherwise seen as in need are less likely to use available services, pushing off their physical needs out of fear. (Food Insecurity at Urban Universities Perspectives during the COVID-19 Pandemic, 2021) Because of this, we cannot simply end the idea of anti-hunger infrastructure the functionality of the projects.
Effective anti-hunger infrastructure not only aims to create accessible food systems but also to de-stigmatize the conversation around hunger and human needs. The development of accessible and student-focused food security systems should be done in tandem with projects of community awareness and demonstrations of compassion. Anti-hunger infrastructure is focused not on the availability of free food but on the food security and hunger mindset of a community. “
I wrote this before I did my second reading, and it will defiantly see some changes. My second reading was “Social infrastructure and the public life of cities: Studying urban sociality and public spaces” by Alan Latham and Jack Layton. I chose this to further my understanding of infrastructure as it applies outside of food security projects and to strengthen my own definition of anti-hunger infrastructure.
Latham and Layton open by questioning what it is that makes a good city, highlighting Eric Klinenberg as a key inspiration for their research stating “A key dimension of a good city is its collective public character. In Palaces for the People, the sociologist Eric Klinenberg (2018) makes the argument that a whole range of physical and institutional infrastructures are crucial for the development and maintenance of social connections. This is an argument for social infrastructure.”
Since I am pursuing community connection and institutionalized trust as a key tenant of anti-hunger infrastructure, I was really excited to find something that explored how community infrastructure as a broader affected social connections, and by proxy human well-being. The paper is split into four sections, the first being Infrastructure, Social Infrastructure, and How to Study It. Latham and Layton once again pull from Klineberg to begin building a definition of social infrastructure, highlighting a quote from Klineberg that addresses different constructions and spaces that are a part of community infrastructure, showing how both sidewalks and churches fit into this category. Human connection in multiple forms.
“In developing the term social infrastructure, Klinenberg is building on and connecting with earlier writers such as Putnam (2000), who talked of a society’s “civic infrastructure” being nurtured by informal social networks, and Oldenberg’s (1989) work on “inclusively sociable” spaces like restaurants, diners, hair salons, cafes, and stores for building trust and community. This work itself connected with a long—particularly American—tradition of ethnographic work on neighbourhood and community life (Cavan, 1966; Gans, 1962; Jacobs, 1961; Liebow, 1967)”
I enjoyed the end of the section, where they are discussing the relational and “transparent” elements of social infrastructure using the example of libraries. They break down some of the properties of infrastructure that make up libraries, that they are “built on an existing base” meaning that book lending is well established, also that they are “fixed in modular increments” and that their purpose must be shifted slowly to mirror their complexity. When discussing the progression and social infrastructure of libraries Latham and Layton also write:
“As the world has become increasingly digital, libraries have had to provide new kinds of facilities for people working, studying, and reading. Infrastructures also involve the “embodiment of standards.” They work because they are able to draw on existing standardised ways of carrying out functions and designing components.”
This very much made me think of Skim, Dive, Surface by Jenea Cohn, especially this quote from the introduction of the Dive portion of the book:
“When we say that reading can only happen in certain spaces at certain times, we’re ignoring all of the students who can’t read in those spaces at those times. These concerns bring the key tension of teaching reading directly to the fore: we know that reading well is important to understanding knowledge, but if we don’t know exactly how to delimit what reading is, then what teaching reading well looks like can feel slippery and hard to delimit.”
In what ways is our current social infrastructure limiting when and where people can access food? How can anti-hunger infrastructure work within the greater concept of social infrastructure to become a widespread practice? What kinds of anti-hunger infrastructure projects are easily incorporated into wider social infrastructure?
The next section “An Infrastructural Approach to Public Life” explores social infrastructure as affects people engaging with people. Public life is defined both as the idea of being around other people but also addressing and conversing with them, and this is used to reinforce the element of community trust that is required for the success for these spaces.
“The concept of social infrastructure helps us think about the public dimensions of urban life, not least in how it orientates us to how the sociality which is entwined with publicness takes place in certain places and facilities. This publicness includes ideas of encounter (Wilson, 2017), but it is also about the ways communities are built, trust developed, cooperation achieved, and friendships made.”
Much of this section feels almost like a call to action, claiming that the sociability of these spaces is key to their successful contributions and therefore sociability and conversation must be included in their creation. They end the section bystating “developing the concept of social infrastructure draws attention to a whole range of often overlooked and underappreciated urban spaces—and all sorts of overlooked and underappreciated practices.”, meaning that community collaboration on these spaces could unlock more potential community resources.
The third section “The Spaces and Socialities of Social Infrastructure” focuses mainly on the ways in which social infrastructure encourages person-to-person engagement, bridges divides between communities, and provides important cultural spaces and connections. Early in the section Latham and Layton write “Public institutions that are provided publicly and designed as facilities for the general public are an important aspect of a city’s social infrastructure, and, unsurprisingly, they have been the focus of much work. Most obviously, these involve places that are explicitly conceived and designed for the public to meet.” This made me think about the digital commons and our city or town commons. How can we utilize the accessibility and collaborative nature of the digital commons to support anti-hunger infrastructure?
Latham and Layton also discuss beneficial and often lacking infrastructure in underserved communities, and the place of business and commercialism in social infrastructure.
“social infrastructure can be an important resource for the economically or socially marginalized. This relates to the work that recognises the ways the liveliness of certain streets and sidewalks connects with shops and similar commercial activity (Hubbard & Lyon, 2018; Klinenberg, 2002). There is also value to be found in the light sociality that can be found in other commercial settings: places like cafes and coffee houses (Henriksen & Tjora, 2018; Latham, 2003; Laurier & Philo, 2006a, 2006b; Puel & Fernandez, 2012), restaurants both fast and slow (Jones et al., 2015; Kärrholm, 2008), bars (Latham, 2005; Lugosi, Bell, & Lugosi, 2010), and social clubs (Conradson, 2003). Commercial spaces designed for particular social groups (such as the LGBTQ+ community) have been important locations for “community life, welfare and wellbeing” (Campkin & Marshall, 2017; p. 4; Taylor & Falconer, 2015; Chauncey, 1994).”
They discuss how these spaces while commercial still provide wanted services and public character to cities, demonstrating an overall deficit in cities that lack community spaces or commercial hubs. These spaces dictate what a resident can eat and purchase, therefore influencing their diet. How can social infrastructure be used not just to distribute and educate but also to improve food citizenship as a whole? How much does social infrastructure impact our quality of life?
The final section was entitled “Towards a Politics of Provision”, and it summarizes the main arguments from each of the previous section before making an argument for “the provision of social infrastructure” and “the need to study the politics involved with the provision of social infrastructure”. I understand provisions as she uses it here to mean the parameters of what social infrastructure offers, but I wish I could ask them to define it for me another way. Within this evaluation, they identify six “dimensions to the provision of social infrastructure that can make it more or less successful.” These are abundance (social surplus), diversity of functionality, maintenance, accessibility, responsiveness to needs and feedback, and an ethos of democratic living.
Each of these elements are applicable to the successful creation and upkeep of strong anti-hunger infrastructure, as well as the integration of digitized learning and online commons. The politics of provision seems to be the human needs-based elements that separate base functionality of a city from a community that thrives. I am curious to see if there is more stuff I can find on the idea of social surplus.
I will be uploading what I have for my final document, I spent a lot of time on it this week but it is defiantly not complete and I am excited to keep writing and make edits with the work from this week. I was really excited to get to read sections from Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer but I cannot find my copy anywhere. If I am able to source it online I will be reading some stories from there next week along with some sections from Skim, Dive, Surface, and I will be uploading my final writing.
This week I focused on readings that evaluate the key elements of reducing and solving hunger on college campuses, report on current projects working to address hunger among students and pitch potential solutions and limitations. These readings included research papers, news articles, and university publications that I plan to use heavily when I create my final document in week 5. I will also be making connections to “Landscapes as living laboratories for sustainable campus planning and stewardship: A scoping review of approaches and Practices” by Trinity Gomez and Victoria Derr. I read Gomez and Derrs’ research paper for my ILC with Anthony Levenda, and in combination with another paper I read this week and a quote from Jenea Cohn it helps me best articulate not only the parallels between food access and access to learning via digital reading, but the ways in which they intersect and their needs coexist.
My first reading was “Food Insecurity at Urban Universities: Perspectives During the COVID-19 Pandemic”, a research paper co-published by the Coalition of Urban Serving Universities and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. I picked this paper for its in-depth evaluation of the research collected and its relevance to Evergreen as a primarily commuter campus located in a city. They also highlighted the University of Washington Tacoma as one of the project sites they worked with, and the physical closeness to the data felt like it may provide better inside as to Evergreens options. The research and report was created with six guiding questions as follows:
How do students at urban universities experience food insecurity? What approaches do universities use to mitigate food insecurity on their campuses and in their communities? How has the COVID-19 pandemic changed food insecurity efforts at universities? How does food insecurity impact student success? What relationship exists between systemic racism and food insecurity among students? What future directions or innovations should be explored to address basic needs?
I really liked being able to see the researchers thought processes in these questions and having them available to help guide my reading. As a small note, what would it be like to have the contributors add their own annotations to this paper via hypothes.is?
Research for this paper was done across five universities in the United States, in the form of interviews, focus groups, and surveys, the questions for which were developed by a group of university leaders and allowed for interviewers to pick questions relevant to the stakeholders. The findings were split into two categories, food insecurity, and institutional culture.
Under food insecurity there are four categories, work and finances, belonging, behaviors, and other basic needs. The next few paragraphs will be my thoughts on their description of each category, but I wanted to highlight this quote from the beginning of the section as I found it very impactful when working through their findings.
“It is critical to stress that these domains co-exist within academic and societal contexts. Minoritized students (low-income, students of color, first-generation), as well as adult learners, come to the university often after surmounting incredible barriers to entry. Food insecurity, then, is often embedded in the conceptualization of what it means to be a college student.”
The idea of the “hungry college student” is a common stereotype, but it’s founded in the historical and current reality that unless you are incredibly wealthy you will have to compromise on some of your basic needs while you’re in college. As food prices rise the issue of food insecurity rises with it, but college students are often studying full-time as well as working, there often aren’t any means left to make more money. Even if scholarships and loans are available, will we reach a point where the majority of people won’t be able to support themselves in college, and therefore not go? Specifically looking at the fourth guiding question “How does food insecurity impact student success?”, I would further ask “How does food insecurity impact student success, and how can educational settings support a student’s continued access to food?”. While I will not at all disagree with the need for college-run basic needs services, if academic success is impacted by hunger then it seems like utilizing learning spaces to ensure food security would create a stronger and more self-sustaining social safety net for students.
The behaviors section explores students’ behaviors resulting from food insecurity and hunger. An early quote that highlighted research findings caught my eye, “According to one university, 89% of students surveyed are eating less than they should because they lack sufficient food or money. In addition to reducing food intake, students also indicated that their meal choices often have low nutritional value, with 67% of students reporting that they cannot afford to eat balanced meals either occasionally or often.” When highlighting behaviors staff use to identify students experiencing food insecurity, they mentioned the more obvious signs such as using the food pantry or other campus tangible resources, but also noted that students with declining academic performance or many absences are often in need of support as well, reporting “one student mentioned that when they experience food insecurity, they spend a significant amount of time searching for and accessing other food options, while navigating an unreliable public transportation system, all of which curtails the amount of available study time.”
This brings me back to the earlier quote and my thoughts on challenging food insecurity in the classroom. Immediately my mind goes to edible gardens, community plots, and college farms, all of which are viable options for both educating and feeding students. While edible gardens are often less for food production, both student garden plots and campus farms can produce a decent amount of food when utilized correctly. While “Landscapes as living laboratories for sustainable campus planning and stewardship: A scoping review of approaches and practices” by Trinity Gomez and Victoria Derr early sections highlight the many benefits of integrated living laboratories and edible gardens, listing fruit and vegetable production, varied benefits to local wildlife and vegetation, sustainable energy production, and decreased stress levels for students. However, as much as I support the creation and ongoing work of these programs, I feel like the solution has to be more accessible. Not every student will want to take part in one of these classes, even if they enjoy the benefits they provide to their campus, and that’s to be expected at any college that offers multiple areas of study. I would think the key lies in the implementation of food access support within all learning spaces, and an emphasis for higher education staff to understand the effects of hunger on academic success.
In the work and finances section they highlight another key piece of their findings; “Nationally, 43% of full-time undergraduate students work while enrolled, almost one-third of whom work more than 20 hours a week. Seventy-one percent of part-time students work more than 20 hours a week, the majority of whom work more than 35 hours each week. 10 Students need to work to pay tuition, meet family responsibilities, and buy food. However, universities are still designed for the college student of yesterday: enrolled full-time, financially dependent on their parents, with no significant responsibilities of their own. As a result, students who must work often have to contend with unfriendly policies and structures that do not take into consideration student availability.”
The number of full-time students who work while they’re enrolled is surprisingly low to me, I don’t know many people with the option to not work in some capacity while they’re in school. But it’s true that college is not set up for the student of today. A full-time program is forty hours a week, I am very lucky to get quite a lot of help from my parents paying for school and housing, but I can’t afford to work less than fifteen hours a week to survive, and twenty if I want to have a savings account. I don’t have a plan for when I become an RA and can only work eight, I don’t know if I can realistically take the sixteen credits I plan to, be an RA, and work a regular job off campus. My options for work are limited to things like babysitting and dog walking, and not only are they unreliable but odd jobs such as that are often inaccessible to those with physical disabilities.
Something that really struck me was in the very last paragraph of the section when a staff member said “If they are coming to us, it is because they often have nowhere else to turn.” What drives the distaste for receiving help from the college as opposed to somewhere else? How can we flip that, and make our places of learning accessible and malleable to the students who want to be there?
Other basic needs is exactly as it sounds, examining the non-edible necessities and how accessible they are to the participating college students. Highlighted was transportation as a means of accessing of campus food resources, noting how the lack of access to a car limits a student’s abilities not only to efficiently reach a grocery store or food bank but also their ability to bring food home. They also mentioned how students would put any and all money into finding or keeping housing, often leaving them with nothing left for food. This section is necessary for the overall framework but didn’t give me a whole lot to write about.
The final section for the food insecurity framework is belonging, which they describe as “the perception that one is welcomed, respected, and able to succeed, and that their experiences with food insecurity matter to others on campus (faculty, staff, and other students). They evaluate the sense of belonging in food insecurity from a few angles. The first was a sense of belonging due to the student’s financial situation, and the fear of being seen using these resources and labeled as poor by a peer. This is one I struggled with personally until not too long ago. It was probably around a year ago I began speaking openly about going through phases of food insecurity and being in less-than-ideal financial situations. I strongly believe that it is a personal choice to disclose such things, but progress will only be made if we can have these kinds of conversations. By casually talking about my experiences I hope that other people will see not only that they aren’t alone, but they will feel safer in seeking out the help they need. In an ideal world we could deconstruct the social stigma that comes with financial insecurity to discover what the non-tangible social fears are, where they come from, and change the way we think about access to basic needs in relation to money.
The second way in which they evaluate the sense of belonging is through the food available to students through on-campus programs. Students are well aware of the poor quality and nutritional value of the food that is usually stocked in these pantries, and a quote that hit home for me was “Not wanting to appear ungrateful for the food, students either take the food and re-donate it or, in some cases, reduce usage of the pantry altogether, and try to access food elsewhere. Even in their time of need, maintaining a sense of dignity was important to them.”
I am a frequent user of food pantries, food banks, and the CCBLA on campus. I never want to be ungrateful for free food, I’m there because I couldn’t get it myself, but too often the food I get is expired, damaged, or straight-up gross. There is a stigma that because I do not want to eat these things I am not really food insecure, but as they said, it comes down to dignity. Of course maintaining dignity is important, we are human beings with very little money or assets, and our dignity is one of the few things within our control. This section also notes the cultural and religious needs that are overlooked when stocking these pantries, and included one student’s very sharp quote “Why does the pantry have Italian salad dressing, but not soy sauce?”
It was this section that made me think most of “Landscapes as living laboratories for sustainable campus planning and stewardship: A scoping review of approaches and practices” by Trinity Gomez and Victoria Derr. One of the key themes of their paper was the social sustainability of these living laboratories (which is a key issue I am working to solve within Evergreens sustainability programs) and early on they pull a quote from their reading research that I immediately thought of when I read this section.
“Sense of belonging among students is particularly important for student retention, particularly for students who experience mental health issues or disabilities and for students from underrepresented groups, such as low income, minoritized, or first generation college students” (Davis, 2012; O’Keeffe, 2013)
A strong sense of belonging within the student body seems like it has a multitude of related benefits, and if we can make students feel as though they belong in a learning space that also offers them resources to overcome their food insecurity not only will we get more students, but they will stay, and they will want to take part in the programs that keep a college environmentally and socially sustainable. This also made me think of a quote from the introductory chapter of the “Dive” section of Jenea Cohns “Skim, Dive, Surface”.
“When we say that reading can only happen in certain spaces at certain times, we’re ignoring all of the students who can’t read in those spaces at those times. ” By removing the barriers of when and where we provide food access, we open the door to a whole other set of people in need to can access those resources, and promote the idea that they belong there.
The second category is institutional culture, with the sections covering policies and structures, inclusivity, and awareness and accessibility. The figures used to depict these three sections are color coded to reflect the correlating issue within food insecurity, and gives me a lot of good inside for creating my final document.
The first section is policies and structures, which is described as “operating procedures that govern institutional structures and outcomes in ways that present barriers to bridging the food insecurity gap.” Within this section they identify the key first step in solving food insecurity to be identifying which of the students are food insecure. One of the ways in which some colleges have done this is by having students scan into the food pantries with their student ID’s, although that has it’s own issues when ID’s are deactivated due to financial holds, often the times in which a student needs the most support. Successful solutions seem to be an emphasis on need-based scholarships, and ongoing funding to purchase food for student food pantries as opposed to donation-based systems.
The second section is about awareness and accessibility, and while it was especially tailored to evaluate student needs in the depths of the pandemic, I think the work that was done must be continued and sustained to meet the need of working students. Universities have identified multiple forms in which a free food pantry or food bank can take, varying the options on their campus to allow as many students as possible to access tangible goods. These are forms include pantries and grab-and-go stations, but also resource centers with cooking lessons, and meal alert systems for extras from catered events. Options like these are beneficial not just for working students, but also for immuno-compromised students who are particularly vulnerable in the current climate.
The last section is inclusivity, and they highlight a specific case that should give Evergreen something to think about. They report on a campus that moved its food pantry to the on-site police station as they had plexiglass barriers good for social distancing, thinking that the move would encourage more students to use the pantry. However it seemed to have the opposite effects, and students reported that they had rarely if ever used the pantry since it had been relocated. Food is essential but this goes back to the desire to maintain dignity, and for some the need to maintain safety. Food isn’t accessible if you put it somewhere students don’t feel as though they can access. We have to have students trust if they are going to take help, by promoting inclusivity and belonging as well as food access in the classroom we can use them to fuel each other.
This paper closes with five final suggestions for solving food insecurity and providing basic needs to college students, and a call to action. Their final ideas are to create new models of financial aid, implementation of a care coordinator position and model, heightened campus gardening, new community partnerships, and support of policy that raises SNAP and WIC benefits and accessibility.
This paper provides me with a really good guideline for categories of problem-solving, and also helped me visualize the collaborations between digital reading and food access. The classroom, and the sense of community that comes with it, is the commons of the solution.
My other readings this week were all to find examples of colleges working to decrease campus hunger. I first read “BU Launches NewInitiative Aimed at Fighting Student Hunger” By Amy Laskowski, published in the BU Times which is the Boston University run news site (not a student newspaper). This article covered two ongoing programs to reduce food insecurity, and one launched this past Spring after receiving a grant from the Massachusetts Hunger-Free Campus Initiative. The Terrier Meal Share allows students to donate their guest passes to students in need, or on the other side request donated meals to be put on their card. Another program runs through the campus food pantry, allowing students to place an online order and pick up their food in the next few days, allowing for both choice and accessibility.
The newly implemented resource is a comprehensive website that makes easily accessible not only the on campus food resources but also free community dinners, food pantries, and information on SNAP and WIC benefits. I would love it if Evergreen had something like this, our website is chaotic and half the links don’t work. We need an online student support hub where you can access financial aid, the CCBLA, RAD, and more.
Next I read an article from University Business. It seems like the meal donation program through college meal plans is a pretty popular option for colleges, but is it really the best? The program at Evergreen is almost as limited as the cafeteria hours. ASU funded a full-time staffer and task force for their pantry, as well as mandating a list of items that must be kept in stock, and Indiana University students made and distributed boxes of fresh food to their peers. Perhaps this doesn’t make any sense but it feels like all of these solutions are to stop students from being hungry, rather than to end student hunger.
The article ends with what they advertise as nine potential solutions, however, I see them as nine essential elements to the solution rather than ones of their own. To highlight a few,
Meaningfully and sensitively promote that food hunger exists, not only nationwide and surrounding communities but on campus.
4. A campus effort takes a variety of stakeholders. Any high-level talks for change should involve different campus leaders and include student populations, as well as the roles that each will fulfill in the effort.
7. Colleges do not operate in a vacuum. They serve large communities often impacted by food insecurity. Many of the students that attend urban and rural institutions are typically in the heart of the struggle. Networking with potential community partners and other businesses to overcome challenges, as North Texas has done, can help bridge those gaps more quickly.
The final article I read this week was “One in three students experience food insecurity nationwide. With state funding, local universities are ramping up efforts to tackle it.” by Emma Folts. This article reports on five Pittsburg colleges that received a grant to combat student hunger, their ideas and plans for the money, and the challenges facing students in the Pittsburg area. Alongside ideas for improved food pantries and campus gardens, I particularly liked a plan from the Pittsburg Technical College to distribute prepared frozen meals in difficult weeks for students such as finals week. This idea comes close to emulating the classroom to food to classroom support I think is needed for comprehensive problem-solving of student hunger.
So far I have two key ideas down for my final document:
-Food insecurity needs to be addressed in and out of the classroom, and the classroom must be flexible to student needs to accommodate students accessing resources. This includes not just campus policy, absences and scheduling, but also extends to the medium with which students can access class materials
-A sense of belonging in the student body community must be developed so students will feel able to access resources around their peers, as well as a sense of trust between the students in need and the resource staff so that students will be more likely to seek them out.
Next week I will be looking through the Evergreen archives for examples of past projects to combat student hunger, publications on food insecurity, and whatever I can find on previous administrations and students actions and philosophy when it comes to providing resources.
This week I focused on readings that provided additional context to hunger and community growing so as to go into research about college-specific issues with more knowledge. I also used this chance to notice the elements mentioned in Skim, Dive, Surface by Jenea Cohn and to further develop some of my ideas surrounding digital reading and food access. My readings this week were; “From Dirt” by Camille T. Dungy, “If All the Stores Close, We Need Foodʼ: Community Gardens Adapt to the Pandemic” by Rachel Wharton, and the Introduction and Chapter 12 of Global Food Futures by Brian Gardener.
The styles of each of these readings were very different, but I was able to draw a lot of parallels between the issues and events that each of them discussed and access to texts through digitization. While reading “From Dirt” by Camile T. Dungy I created my own metaphor that parallels food access and knowledge access using Dungy’s own story with seeds. It has really stuck with me and I am hoping to make it understandable and explainable by the end of the quarter, as I think it could be a really great way for food studies students to think about digital reading and information access. It also made me really want to develop better writing practices so I may wrote something publishable about my ideas one day. I wonder what Cohn has to say about digital journalism?
Global Food Futures by Brian Gardener – Introduction: Does the world face a continuous “food crisis”? & Chapter 12: Access to food
In the introductory chapter of his book, Brian Gardener seeks to help the reader understand the nuances of the global food system specifically as they were impacted by economic changes between 2006 and 2012, the time-sensitive production and distribution improvements needed to keep up with the rise in population, and the inevitable issue of climate change and its impact on agriculture and food distribution across the globe.
Early on Gardener identifies two outlooks on the future of global food production, stating “There are two current views of the future world food supply and demand situation—the pessimistic and the optimistic. The pessimistic view that the world’s agricultural resources are overstretched and incapable of meeting rising demand for an increasing population is currently the accepted opinion, but there is gathering evidence to support a more optimistic conclusion. The optimistic view is that science and improved husbandry can maintain increased output at a level needed to feed a 30 percent increase in global population.”
He identifies the reasoning of the pessimists, with a big contributor being issues of oil, energy, and climate change restrictions, but notes that “It has been estimated that the world’s farms need to produce 70–100 percent more food by the second half of the current century, despite climate change, energy scarcity, and regional dietary shifts” and in-text it feels very much as if he is saying “we can’t afford to be pessimistic or slow down”. In both the introductory chapter and chapter 12 Gardner references sub-Saharan Africa as a place in desperate need of food assistance, their issues stemming from land use decisions, climate change, lack of market access and food distribution availability, and degrading practices of other countries. It seems to be the most comprehensive example of a “food needy” country as Gardener would put it, and yet he argues that the issue is not in their food supply.
Gardener argues that the issue of hunger across the globe stems from the improper distribution of food rather than a lack of food in the food system overall. While he makes many references to our need to increase how much food our agricultural system produces, he makes sure to nail down where the biggest barrier is in solving hunger. “Clear evidence shows that the world “food problem” remains distributional and developmental rather than because of a long-term inability to increase output.”
It is with this idea that Gardener begins to defend his optimistic view and provide his solutions for long-term food system sustainability, and it is here I was able to draw some parallels between digital reading and food access. Within his idea that the implementation and support of biotechnology in developing countries, you can draw the same conclusions as you do with the support and implementation of digitizing technology, both of which require the support of someone with more wealth or power who may not directly see the rewards of their actions. In Gardeners’ words “Adequate agricultural infrastructure, including access to markets for inputs and for the sale of surplus, is essential to ensure food supplies.” For human progression and societal development, people need access to information as they do food, one for the survival of our bodies and one for the survival of our society, which is really one and the same.
“If All the Stores Close, We Need Foodʼ: Community Gardens Adapt to the Pandemic” by Rachel Wharton
In this New York Times article Rachel Warton tells the story of food access through community gardens in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the article itself was only a few pages in length it told stories from all across the country of community gardens adapting to the new reality as their communities need for food grew but their resources decreased. This article was published on April 10th 2020, less than a month after the first federal Covid guidelines went into effect on March 15th, and it feels like some of the most important agricultural records we have of the pandemic, a collection of thoughts from the organizers and staff members of the gardens that fed their communities through the pandemic.
This article had an abundance of touching quotes from organizers across the country but I was particularly taken by this one:
“Marguerite Green, the executive director of a New Orleans nonprofit group called Sprout Nola, is preparing for the day gardens have to replace grocery stores altogether. “I’m worried we won’t be able to get fresh food other than locally,” said Ms. Green, 31, who has seen food scarcity before. She was a senior in high school when Hurricane Katrina shut down her city in 2005, and recalls weeks of eating nothing but M.R.E.s, the instant meals prepared for the military. Ms. Green went on to get a degree in vegetable production before joining Sprout Nola, which runs its own community garden and helps support several others. “I didn’t want to be in that position again,” said Ms. Green, who put together a series of plans within days of Louisiana’s shelter-in-place rule on March 12, which also shuttered farmers’ markets.”
The early pandemic felt a lot like the book “Bird Box”, a disaster that could only hurt you if you looked at it. Or if someone else looked at it and came too close to you. You never looked out the window and saw a forest fire caused by COVID, the world looked the same but emptier. A natural disaster must weigh on you in a way unknown to those who haven’t experienced such mass destruction. As I read this and reread this I wondered how the memory of M.R.E’s impacted Ms. Greens actions as she adapted to feed her community throughout the pandemic.
Those able to provide for themselves were inarguably better prepared for the pandemic, and it made me think about how we can best prepare ourselves and our schools for all modes and contexts of learning, how does digital reading play into societal adaptation, and how will it hold up to the test of time?
“From Dirt” by Camille T. Dungy
This essay was an absolutely phenomenal piece of writing that combined BIPOC agricultural history with the author’s personal history and connection with the topic, as well as making clear how intersectionally infinite the topic of agriculture is, and why we must approach it with that in mind. It is while reading this that I developed a new metaphor for demonstrating and visualizing the parallels between food studies and digital reading.
I began to develop it when Dungy talked about heirloom Cherokee seeds sent to her through the mail for the price of postage. I wrote in my annotation “Seeds as a non-textual source of generational knowledge? Seeds can’t be digitized, but the research from them can, what is the seed and what is the learning? The bite and the taste? The meal and the emotion?” This idea of “the bite and the taste” stuck with me as I kept reading, and I kept wondering how this idea of the seed and the growth played into the overall narrative of it all. When you have a text, you read and you absorb in quick succession, when you eat you take a bite and taste in the same way. While the source can be consumed again we only absorb it for the first time once, and set our opinions often based on the initial intake.
How does the seed play into this idea? Seeds have no authors, but they have planters and caretakers, you can’t regrow a vegetable but you can always regrow the same plant. You sow the seed, and then you grow the result, the knowledge gained is an equal reward to the product itself. This part of the metaphor I am still figuring out, but I am happy with the direction it is going, and even if I only fully flush out the “bite-taste to read-absorb” section this quarter that I am still very excited to see where this goes, I am incredibly pleased with it already.
Later in the essay Dungy talks about the restrictions Thomas Jefferson enforced on enslaved people that dictated what they could and couldn’t grow in their own fields, citing a letter in which he says “There is no other way of drawing a line between what is theirs and mine,”. As Dungy wrote about how she thinks on this as she grows whatever she pleases in her gardens, I thought on how this relates to modern-day book banning, censorship of information in public schools and libraries, and its connection to improving access to learning through the digitization of texts and learning materials. How does this “crop elitism” as I might call it, mirror present information access and what can we take from history that could help us remove barriers in education?
Next week will be focused on readings that present issues of student hunger as well as proposed and in practice on campus solutions.
This week I chose to read chapters from Jenea Cohns book Skim, Dive, Surface, moving to the second section of this book, which focuses on the “dive” element advertised in the title. I will read these chapters and apply Cohns teachings as I read over the course of my ILC, evaluating my reading process as I go and making parallels between the consumption of food and literature, and access to food and academics. As my ILC is on a shorter timeline than usual, 5 weeks instead of 10, I will also be evaluating how the pace of consumption affects my learning.
Skim, Dive, Surface by Jenea Cohn – An Introduction to the Digital Reading Framework
In this introductory chapter to the “dive” section of the book, Cohn introduces the reader the five concepts that would be explored, later elaborating “The five concepts within this framework capture five categories for engagement for readers to cultivate as they move between digital and non-digital spaces to do the work of deep, sustained, and engaged reading” (p.131) These categories are curation, connectivity, creativity, contextualization, and contemplation, and double as the chapter titles for the following five chapters. Within this ILC I plan to read “curation”, “connectivity”, and “creativity”, but I am hoping to read the last two in week 5 if time allows it.
The chapter opens with some ideas surrounding reading and lived experience that snacks up the work that I did in spring, talking about how our experiences dictate what good reading looks and feels like to us as individuals. This lead me down a rabbit hole of questioning what I perceive “good reading” as, and where those habits came from, are they productive or are they just ingrained? Did I read something “better” because I remember more of it, or because I had more questions? Does my enjoyment of the texts or agreement with the writer change the outcome of my comprehension of it?
Cohn goes on to push for accessibility in schools via more mediums of reaching knowledge, stating “Some educators argue that they can’t necessarily anticipate all of the possible students that may enter their classroom spaces and, therefore, they cannot make multiple options for reading available to their students. To this end, I take up Anne-Marie Womack’s (2017) argument that accommodation is “the process of teaching itself” (p. 494).” I enjoyed her discourse on what reading is defined as and the generality of the idea of acquiring knowledge, and how she worked it into the need to expand the means through which students can access learning materials. My favorite quote from the chapter was here, when Cohn says
“When we say that reading can only happen in certain spaces at certain times, we’re ignoring all of the students who can’t read in those spaces at those times. These concerns bring the key tension of teaching reading directly to the fore: we know that reading well is important to understanding knowledge, but if we don’t know exactly how to delimit what reading is, then what teaching reading well looks like can feel slippery and hard to delimit.”
Chohn goes on to describe the five concepts mentioned above and lets the reader know what they can expect for each section, before inviting them to read selectively, to take what they need, and leave the rest. This is one of my favorite things about Cohn, her ability to demonstrate the practical applications of her writing within her own work, offering the reader more than knowledge, but almost a skill class.
Skim, Dive, Surface by Jenea Cohn – Curation
Cohn starts this chapter by recalling her time in college making mixed CD’s for her friends, the ways in which she would order songs to tell stories and give the listener a journey, and how thematic playlists can be used to convey emotion. This opens into a broader discussion of the change in format in the way we curate music. With the fast rise and takeover of digital music, not only has the reach of our playlists grown but our options have expanded tremendousley. This changed has happned in tandem with the digitization of litreture, as the age of the internet has given the same oportunity for anyone to make their music public as it has texts. But this parralell of playlists are important not just for their medium but also for the way playlists are used to convey messages through multiple songs.
Cohns quote “a successful reading curator can bring together multiple streams of thought to come to a unifiedn conclusion about what the text means to them.” really captures what I have been trying to do in my ILC’s, but it also got me thinking about taste buds and personal history. The curration of our own menus happens over time and experience, and most people have one whether or not they think about it. Not only can we convey emotion through food, but I think we can tell stories through a meal the same way you could through a playlist.
Moving to discuss students and curation, Cohn gives a few examples of other teachers and writers in-classroom activites used to teach and reienforce curation skills in their students. Online platforms such as pintrest are referenced a few times as a popular way to teach students to digitally organize their thoughts and findings, another example of the usefulness of digitization in the classroom, especially as many of these activities are used in small group or partner settings but can be done from home.
An example activity by Jason McIntosh looks very much like the style of annotation I already subscribe to. As described “three different approaches to using digital content curation tools in a first-year composition course that he teaches: clipping, tagging, and annotating (p. 178). Clipping refers to the moment when you find something from the web and save a portion of it as a clip rather than the whole piece; tagging is adding a user-defined label or short phrase to something; and annotating is adding longer notes to a text.” This is the way I aim to annotate, it takes the pressure off making each note profound and allows me to get my real thoughts into reccord. And I believe that this, combined with Ryan Traceys refrenced thoughtwork “curation framework encourages curators to name the function of the sources they’ve curated. For example, a reader may curate a collection of sources to add value to a particular conversation or to extend awareness of a particular thought.”, is how I develope my best ILC work and therfore my best thought enquiries and discoveries.
Cohn concludes the chapter with her own curation activities, saying “The overarching goal of these activities is to help students curate collections of ideas—either within a single reading or across multiple readings—so they will have constructed their own individualized impressions of how concepts from readings are in conversation with each other or how those concepts connect to what the students previously learned in the course.” I particularly liked the third activity “Where In The World Does This Idea Go? Creating A Key Concepts Map” in which students using multiple sources and readings creating an integrated mind map that connects key ideas within one reading to those within another. I think if I were to help a first or second year student write their first ILC I would encourage them to make this an ongoing project within, it would provide not only great practice but also a satisfying end product.
Curation is one of the fundementals of writing ILC’s like the ones I do, and especially when curating semi-blind as I have to for school, creating a mind map like this before I do my readings to identify the key themes I am looking for throught my ILC could also be an interesting activity. Regardless, curation is a skill I feel I have strengthend heavily over the past couple years and was the chapter I was most looking forward to. I am curious how curation can be used not only as something taught but as a way to assist students.
Skim, Dive, Surface by Jenea Cohn – Connection
“Connection” as an idea within this book seemed like a really broad term, so I was excited to see what direction Cohn would take when discussing it. She started by painting a scene involving building Ikea furniture and connecting (or not) to the instruction booklet. She draws easy parallels from here to talk about digital reading, discussing the ways in which e-readers may make a reader feel less connected from the text.
“When you access a text on an e-reader, it may not be obvious how long a text is, and the internal headings for the text may not be easily scannable. Without quickly flipping through the length of the text itself, seeing how it is organized and what’s to come, it may be challenging to get a sense of where the text is going or how it builds from beginning to end. Certainly, readers can scroll through a full text or swipe the digital pages to get a feel for its larger body, but that interaction may not be as accessible as it is in a bound stack of papers or a book” (p.158)
When discussing scholarly connections, Cohn has a particularly interesting section on hyperlinks and their academic uses. While at first I didn’t think much of this section, the more I thought about it the more I could see how incredibly useful hyperlinks can be and could be in the creation and curation of research projects. Hyperlinks on articles and journals have driven so much new ILC learning over the last few years, and have allowed me to add additional context where the writer feels necessary, which adds another level of reading as you can infer the writer’s intentions more clearly. While a book will have citations, hyperlinks allow the reader instant access to more knowledge and context.
She later goes on to talk about the general practice of teaching reading skills in higher education, citing a 2016 study by Tara Lockhart and Mary Soliday that “many students may not acquire these skills in any other places or have access to academic skill development in this way. In a multiyear study in which undergraduates at a large, public research institution were interviewed about their college reading experiences, Tara Lockhart and Mary Soliday (2016) found that many students reported reading practices as a critical component of their ability to enter into academic discourse communities in their upper-level courses” As I think about teaching critical reading and thinking skills in higher education and the effects of our personal history on our consumption of literature across multiple mediums, I also want to think about how the parallel of food, cooking, and personal history falls in. If higher education can reteach one how to read, and how to question what they are reading, how can we also use higher education and college to read teach food thought and cooking practices? And how does connection (and curation) fit into the idea of building our personal menu? How can digitization of texts link both the teaching of reading skills and food thought for questioning and reflection?
The last section of the chapter is example class activities, my favorite was #2 “Highlight And Link” in which the student digitally annotates a text with links relating to their annotated section. I have gotten more rigid with my ILC structure and I wonder if this activity would help me in future quarters, and allow me to be more explorative as I was when I first started. Cohn lists one of the key chapter takeaways as “Engaging in connection fosters curiosity in students to promote inquiry-based thinking.” How can we use higher learning to foster healthy curiosity about food?
