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Dr. Dilafruz Williams – Living Soil as Poetic and Critical Text: Pedagogy Underground for Regenerative Hope

As thousands of learning gardens have sprouted on school grounds across countries and continents, soil provides an exquisite pedagogical entry point for poetic and critical text in nurturing students’ connection with the more-than-human world. Normally out-of-sight and out-of-mind, direct hands-on interaction with living soil in gardens provides children and youth with regenerative hope beyond gloom and doom of environmental issues. Using photo-essay of students’ poems, art, class murals, and scientific and critical engagement with soil in several learning gardens, we will collectively explore: what can adults learn from the young whose emotive engagement in gardens captures both the biology of soil and affective awakenings?

Your Timezone

  • Timezone: America/New_York
  • Date: Mar 16 2022
  • Time: 6:25 PM - 7:15 PM

Speaker

  • Dr. Dilafruz Williams Dr. Dilafruz Williams Author, Garden-Based Educator
    Dr. Dilafruz Williams
    Dr. Dilafruz Williams
    Author, Garden-Based Educator

    Dilafruz Williams, PhD is Professor of Leadership for Sustainability Education in the department of Educational Leadership and Policy at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, where she has taught since 1990. With dozens of partners, she has designed, co-founded, and supported several cutting-edge initiatives, such as:

    – Learning Gardens Laboratory
    – Leadership for Sustainability Education Master’s program
    – Sunnyside Environmental School
    – An NSF-funded project, Science in the Learning Gardens: Factors that Support Ethnic and Racial Minority Students in Low-Income Schools.

    A prolific scholar, Dr. Williams has authored over 70 chapters, journal articles, and curriculum resource guides and has given close to 200 invited lectures, symposia, and conference papers. Her research has focused extensively on garden-based education, environmental education, place-based education, urban education, and service learning. Her co-authored book, Learning Gardens and Sustainability Education:

    Bringing Life to Schools and Schools to Life (Routledge, 2012), presents a practical model of student engagement with gardens, that serve as milieus for learning. She is also co-editor of Ecological Education in Action: On Weaving Education, Culture, and the Environment (SUNY, 1999).

    Dr. Williams has given workshops and keynote addresses in Australia, Austria, Canada, India, Nepal, New Zealand, Seoul-Korea, South Africa, and the United States. She is the recipient of several awards and honors. She was elected city-wide to the Portland School Board, 2003-2011. She has graduate degrees from Bombay, Syracuse, and Harvard Universities in the sciences, public administration, and education. Her passion for gardens is evident in her own delight in engagement with soil, plants, and wildlife in the multitude of manifestations of wonders and mystery that a garden offers. For her research, curriculum, instruction, and projects see http://learning-gardens.org/ and https://sites.google.com/pdx.edu/dilafruz/