What It Means to Learn Outdoors With My Black and Brown Students
The difference between sitting on grass and broken wooden chairs
Many professors don’t take their students off-campus without an obvious reason. Now that I think of it, that may be why I began to do it when I became an academic.
I was suffocated by being confined to a room with no windows, fluorescent lighting, and rows after rows of chairs attached to small desks. I also realized that many of my students believed that something as simple as sitting on real grass, discussing social politics or literature, belonged to white people. As a Black and Latino Studies professor in New York City, many of my students had no experience spending time in nature.
We lost count of the number of movies with imagery that reinforced that we don’t exist in certain spaces. Many of my students, urban-dwelling commuters like myself, bought into the stereotype that outdoor learning wasn’t part of their cultural identities.
What difference did it make to sit on grass instead of broken wooden chairs?
On a field trip to one of the famous botanical gardens in New York City, a student pointed out that there were more people of color working in support staff positions…
