Teaching in Common: Reimagining Curriculum Development in Sustainable Food Systems Education

Abstract

To meet an increasingly complex set of global challenges, undergraduate programs need innovative, well aligned curricula that prepare students to effectively address those challenges. This is especially true in programs such as sustainable food systems education (SFSE) where students learn to think systemically, critically, and reflectively, and act collectively across difference. These developmental skills cannot be achieved in a single course, and thus require curricular cohesion and alignment. For this to happen, instructors in a program must work together to develop a collective understanding of the purpose of the curriculum, the intended student learning outcomes, and how each course contributes to the whole. Using that understanding, instructors must work collaboratively to deliver a coherent curriculum, adjusting their courses as needed and contributing to efforts to update or improve the curriculum. The research described here is the result of action research with three undergraduate SFSE programs working to engage in this kind of curriculum management in their own programs, and in collaboration across programs. First, curriculum mapping, a process of identifying how a program’s learning outcomes are addressed and assessed within and across courses, is explored. Curriculum mapping is a common undertaking in higher education, but descriptions of the specific processes used are hard to find. This work contributes to the literature by describing two highly participatory, instructor-driven methods based on experiences mapping at the University of Minnesota (UMN) and University of British Colombia (UBC). Next, mapping is considered as a process extending beyond the creation of maps to foster deep and productive discussions about curricula. Once created, curriculum maps can function as boundary objects, things that help groups of differently situated actors work across difference, so creating a map should be seen as the start of a larger process rather than an end goal. This research describes facilitated curriculum development workshops at UMN, UBC and Montana State University and observes that relational work, the effort people invest in managing their relationships with others, ideally in mutually growth supporting ways, is fundamental to managing curricula as cohesive wholes. Finally, curricula are theorized as a new kind of commons. Commons are resources shared by a group and subject to social dilemmas, just as curricula are shared resources whose management present challenges to time and resource strapped programs. Curricula posited as contributory commons, which are commons that rely on the willing, active, and ongoing contributions of producers (instructors) to maintain the shared resource (a curriculum). To address the challenges of managing curricula as contributory commons, six interconnected recommendations are offered, calling for investment of time and resources in curricula, and in the collective willingness and ability of instructors in a program to work together for curriculum management and innovation. To think of curricula as commons moves away from academia’s emphasis on individual teaching responsibilities and towards collective pedagogical interdependence, recognizing the importance and value of attending as much to relationships and pedagogy as to scholarly pursuits.