Month: December 2011

….We discovered that being able to proceed into the obscurity of the
unknown is not always congruent with the reality of logic, reason and predictable outcomes.  The challenges that we faced became a classroom that taught us to work through conflict, mediate and appreciate differences, evaluate the feasibility of ideas, and ask the ultimate
question, what is education for (Orr, 2000).

While it is easy to talk about our relationship to the earth and to the food that we eat, it is more difficult to talk about the relationships that happen behind food, between farmers and buyers, between activists and politicians, between educators and students, grocery-shoppers, multi-national corporations, scientists, and families. That is when things become messy. It is within those relationships, between our community partner and their community partners that we need to work through, between group members with differing opinions and styles. Perhaps we accidentally discovered one of the reasons why our current food system is in crisis; we have been trying to accomplish a task without seeing that everything must operate through
relationship and process, and when that principle is compromised, there is a breakdown evident in everything from the soil to the air.

An exerpt from our final group paper, LFS 350, 2011.  Group 09. These are my reflections, integrated into the whole, on the process of working through process to reach a goal.

(A blurb taken from the final paper, LFS 350, 2011, Group 09.) My reflections on community service learning.

”Our CSL experiences gave us a unique exposure to another component of the overall food system, which contributed to a greater understanding of the intricate connections between land, food, and community. The value and opportunity of community service is that it creates a real life context for academic learning, and re-instills the reality that our education must be for more than our own self-improvement. Ultimately, we as students need to learn from our communities as much, if not more, than our communities need us to help them. Furthermore, it helps us as students to realize that while knowledge is invaluable, it’s worth hinges on the ability to successfully
communicate and relate to others in a mutually beneficial way.”