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Environmental Studies I ENVS 130B Justice & Sustainability in Agriculture I Winter 2025
Edith Gonzales is a recent graduate of the Environmental Studies PhD program with an expertise in ecological knowledge in urban farms and gardens. In Winter 2024, Gonzales lectured for ENVS 130B: Justice and Sustainability in Agriculture. It was her first experience as an instructor of record, yet as PhD student, Gonzales had gained some familiarity with theories and practices of pedagogy by facilitating a community of practice with other grad students. When she saw the call for "Difficult Conversations," she recalls, "as a person who is impressed with the work pedagogy contributes to the world, I felt in my body that I wanted to partake in this community space."
“Becoming a brave educator is a rich and personal experience.
It is also political and it benefits most from being in community.”
Going into the Difficult Conversations group, Gonzales was also thinking structurally—about how material conditions of work affect educators' capacity to rest, generate energy, convey excitement, prepare materials, and organize their thoughts and communications. "While it's of utmost importance to have the tools to hold space of our students," she says, "it is equally necessary to expect that the university system as our employer cans support us." Structural conditions have ripple effects that delimit educators' ability to address critical current events and hold difficult conversations in the classroom.
Gonzales' zine documents her experiences teaching 130B this year, amidst the tumult of Trump's second term, the ongoing climate crisis and the structural inequalities underpinning labor contracts that bind lecturers to the university system. "I've been digesting a lot very slowly," she says.
Zine_GonzalesEdithA key method that Gonzales employed in 130B was conceptualizing the classroom as a "relational space." Although she regrets missing the opportunity to generate community agreements with her students, she drew upon relational knowledge and relational ways of thinking and seeing when analyzing case studies and examples in the course. "Perhaps I took a very experiential approach to relational work as modeled by critical Latinx Indigeneities, Black Ecologies, and the larger works of ethnic studies. I've been taught by professors who when speaking or educating about a community—they managed to create a space to see ourselves reflected."
Some examples of relational learning in Gonzales' classroom:
I highlighted the plight of farmworkers + UFW [United Farm Workers] organizing by inviting Dr. Paiz, showcasing UFW El Macriado, newspaper images, protesting the application of pesticides in agriculture.
Drawing from lived experience, I can see and I know this is the result of capital developmental processes, settler colonialism, green revolution.
But not everyone has this experience, so how to amplify it and make it so that students would not only try to imagine what those farmworkers navigated but also why it is necessary to challenge the power structure.
How could they take this case study of a community's struggle and apply it to an issue they are directly impacted by or passionate about?
Highlighted the historical, contemporary, and developing challenges confronting farmers around the world & in the US.
Another method rooted in relational pedagogy that Gonzales employed was embodied learning.
Students read excerpts from Leanne B. Simpson's As We Have Always Done. This activity encouraged students to hear the voice of an Indigenous thinker and to compare Native peoples experience of settler colonialism with settler colonialism as defined in theory.
"Tapping into the somatic experiences," she explains, "encouraged students to pay attention to how their bodies responded when they listened to these words and even to consider if they feel similarly and in what way their freedom is connected to other communities' freedom.
When concepts or my own embodied response were heavy, I stopped lecture and welcomed a break, a neck stretch, a pause for water."
Effectiveness: Gonzales noticed "little moments of affirmation"—times when students came up to her after specific lectures and said they "were the best ones" or appreciated certain parts of their work together. This was one gauge of effectiveness. More broadly, Gonzales found that the whole process of participating in the Difficult Conversations community of practice was an exercise in self-reflection within structural and institutional conditions that can—but don't always—support liberatory learning. "Becoming a brave educator," she concludes in her zine," is a rich and personal experience. It is also political and it benefits most from being in community. My hope for future brave educators is that they ask for collaboration, demand structural change, take care of their wellbeing and experience as much joy as possible with students."
Explore Gonzales full 'zine here!
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