In this chapter, I present the salient learning of this study clustered in four categories: loss, community connections, community versus commodity, and one methodological finding. I end by commenting on the tension between the goals of the study and the context in which the study was conducted.
Loss
Both the students and adults in this small, rural, southern Appalachia community perceive an acute loss of cultural knowledge of place and self-sufficiency. The students in the study attributed the loss to the apathy of their generation; the adults traced the process as far back as the 1960s. The official curricula taught in Bailey County Schools are silent around knowledges of place; this silence both contributes to the erosion of knowledges of place in the community and reifies the globalized, corporate paradigm of neoliberal education. It was the perception of this loss - and a lack of confidence in the global food system’s ability to continue - that
motivated students to participate in local food projects. Community Connection
The students who participated in the seed saving project were not transformed by their interactions with elder seed savers; rather, those interactions were sites of continuity and connections with their own family traditions. For the youth in the study, their heritage is a
heritage of action and acquiring knowledge meant a responsibility to use it for the benefit of their community. Both the food growers and the seed savers perceived the benefits of their
participation in the local food endeavors not in terms of a benefit to them personally, but in terms of the benefits they brought to the community. I describe this as an “embedded agency” - an agency that is expressed in terms of giving, helping, sharing and empowering others. This non-
individualist idea of power stands in diametric opposition to the individualized sense of self upon which the Western episteme and neoliberal education, specifically, is built.
Commodity versus Community
Just as the HHS’s curricula is a function of and in service to the global economy, the agencies and departments that participated in the student-grown food project were aligned to have the cafeterias be supplied by corporate food distributors, not student-grown food. This project highlighted the misalignment between agencies when they tried to function in support of a local food system. Serving student-grown sweet potatoes in the school cafeteria introduced a different way of valuing a meal in the school cafeteria. The presence of the sweet potatoes brought the non-economic valuations of pride, learning, resilience, generosity and community connection into the cafeteria. Those valuations dethroned the profit motive in the school cafeteria and by doing so, challenged the hegemony of capitalist values in public education.
Not only did these two local food projects staked out food as a context that opens non-
commodified spaces, the projects forged tighter connections between HHS students, between students and elders in their community and between agencies in Bailey County.
In directing the resources and capacities of the school and community in the service of the local community and not the global economy, these two local food system projects created otherwises to the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000) as manifested in 21st century public school food and neoliberal public school curricula.
Methodological
Non-participatory action research’s ability to affect systems-level change - such as food system localization - is limited if the project doesn’t address a need that the community itself has identified and agreed to collectively address.
Shifting contexts
While this study generated evidence of otherwises to the colonial/modern structures of power and knowledge, it took place in a colonial/modern context. We burned a lot of diesel busing children between the school and the farm and around the county to meet seed savers. We sprayed our crops with a microbiological insecticide produced by a chemical company owned by a Japanese investment group. We grew some of our crops on plastic and we harvested the food we grew in such a way that prevented us from getting all the plastic out of the ground. The produce we grew quickly became a “commodity” whose worth was measured by global market pricing.
This was not a decolonial Camelot or a Shangri-La of sustainability. This was a step in a process. It was a step away from colonial systems of thinking and eating - with their choke points of exclusion and scarcity - and toward epistemologies and food systems that privilege
community over corporations. But, like all first steps, it was mired in and a product of the very context it was trying to change.
The conception of education that we moved toward or that this study suggested is importantly different than the neoliberal educational context within which it happened. In a culture whose worship of the digital sings the hymn of “There’s an app for that,” the study participants' favorite source of knowledge was people who grew up before electrification. In a town with 1,800 people and nine fast food restaurants, teenagers found enormous value in spending six months growing one side dish. And in the context of an education system that values competition and individual achievement, the students in the study described their idea of power as being something they enacted in cooperation with others.
While the study happened amidst late capitalism’s cult of convenience, we opened a space for different ways of being in the world and we opened space for public education to manifest itself according to different models. As I detail in the next chapter, I think we are in the early stages of a seismic shift in the context of public education. I would like to think that, to again use Thomas Sergiovanni’s (1994) terminology, this study was part of a process of shifting away from schools as bureaucratic organizations and towards an idea of public schools as communities engaged in the teaching and learning what it means to live with each other here, in our very specific geographic surrounds.