No abstract

California has been heralded as a beacon of agricultural production and productivity, yet its groundwater crisis is a warning of its impending collapse. In this paper, we argue that policies like California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act reinscribe the settler state, even as they aim toward environmental sustainability. Drawing from Indigenous feminist scholarship on water and frontier processes, our methodology traces settler colonialism materially and discursively through the movement of water. First, we analyze hydraulic engineering discourses at the turn of the 20th century to illustrate how racial logics were key to producing irrigation—and the broader project of white settlement—as ostensibly benevolent processes of improvement. We then highlight how turn-of-the-century legislation was central to producing agriculture as a site of accumulation by dispossession through the production of settler forms of property and relations with land and water. Finally, we consider groundwater overdraft as a vertical frontier. Thinking with water as an analytic, we study the nexus of relationships that inscribe settler water infrastructures as normative, demonstrating their role as frontier processes within a settler colonial present. Our analysis shows the necessity of dismantling settler modes of sustainability and centering and supporting Indigenous sovereignty.

A broad body of literature outlines the interventions to support underrepresented and minoritized students’ inclusion and sense of belonging into university contexts. In this paper, we explore how two first-generation students of color articulate a critical sense of belonging through their reflections as student researchers in the Apprenticeship in Community-Engaged Research or (H)ACER program at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). (H)ACER integrates community engagement, ethnographic sensibilities, critical race and decolonial theory, as well as women of color feminisms into a curriculum designed to train critical scholar-researchers. Through themes of feeling isolated on campus and returning ‘home’ in the garden, building comfort with academic theory, and navigating insider/outsider identities in campus/community contexts, we trace how the students developed an awareness of their positionality and made sense of their experiences of ‘belonging’, both within the campus and community contexts. Their narratives spark our deeper exploration into how critical approaches to community-engaged research may offer a pedagogy for supporting student sense of belonging that extends beyond inclusion, a promising vein of further research.

We are exploring whether and how "DigitalStorytelling" can be used to a) attract and engage student apprentices otherwise estranged from STEM-linked career or education pathways b) help student apprentices address the complexities of ill-formed or "wicked" design problems typical of sustainable engineering. Building on preliminary evidence from a pilot 2014 study we hypothesize that apprentices who engage in digital storytelling can gain proficiency in key reasoning skills related to scientific argumentation including: 1. formulating and articulating problem statements 2. anticipating and understanding tradeoffs, limitations and contingencies of proposed solutions and 3. justifying solutions relative to requirements/specifications articulated in the problem statement. Our continuing work is in the development and validation of evaluation and assessment instruments appropriate for evaluating these skills among apprentices focused on digital storytelling and for drawing comparisons against apprentices engaged in "hands-on" sustainable design projects. Our overarching objective is to offer evidence validating digital storytelling as an alternative pedagogy for introducing and teaching STEM reasoning skills to newcomers or "outsiders".

The Apprenticeship in Ecological Horticulture (AEH) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been teaching people organic and ecological horticulture for 43 years. This paper examines the extent to which the program has met the goals of growing farmers and gardeners, and contributing to change in the food system. It also explores specific programmatic ways the AEH contributed to these outcomes. We surveyed program alumni from 1989 through 2008. Findings suggest that the program has successfully met its goals. According to alumni suggestions, the primary way the program contributed to these outcomes was by developing apprentice knowledge and skills through hands-on activities. In addition, other educational components, not always explicitly addressed in similar programs, were also key. We use different learning theories to help understand the AEH's success and make recommendations for similar programs.