News
New "Growing Diversity" Initiative Receives Funding From Wabash Center
April 03, 2019
Beginning Summer 2019, Drs. Sarah King (associate professor of Liberal and Religious Studies) and Amy McFarland (assistant professor, Honor's College), are launching a new interdisciplinary, collaborative effort to explore religious diversity in place-based food justice education. This initiative will be supported by funding from the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion. In particular, the project will explore the ways in which place-based experiential education at the Sustainable Agriculture Project (SAP) can support religious & cultural diversity work on campus, and to implement our learning in our classes.
The Growing Diversity Project will develop a faculty learning community to support interested faculty in Religious, Area, and Food Studies in mutual mentorship to address religious diversity and food justice pedagogically. The initiative is designed to scaffold resources, coaching, and peer support for faculty members at each stage of learning and implementation in a responsive iterative model. This design will make faculty training and course redesign less onerous and more rewarding for faculty, and therefore ensure new and redesigned courses using high-impact pedagogies are actualized and offered to students. It will also offer the opportunity to identify and act together to address issues of religious diversity and food justice within our campus community, as well as developing critical understanding and increasing capacity among faculty.
At the SAP, the project will facilitate social justice and civic engagement in religious studies classrooms and support addressing religion and religious diversity in food justice classrooms. In the long term, we hope that this will increase the diversity of students involved in food justice work on our campus, and contribute to increasing religious tolerance on campus, and help us discern how we can best promote religious diversity and inclusion in food systems work which is traditionally a privileged space.
Growing Diversity is one part of the larger GVSU Growing Grand project, which seeks to diversify and strengthen place-based food systems education at the SAP. The Co-Directors of Growing Grand/Growing Diversity are both involved in leadership at the SAP. Dr.Sarah King is Associate Professor in Liberal and Religious Studies and Dr. Amy McFarland is Assistant Professor in the Honors College. Both teach in GVSU's Environmental Studies Program, too. Dr. King was a fellow in the Wabash Mid-Career Colloquy Pedagogies of Community Engagement, and she holds a PhD in the Study of Religion and Environmental Studies from the University of Toronto. Dr. McFarland is the Academic Coordinator of the SAP and holds a PhD in Horticulture with a focus on understanding the intersections of humans, the environment, and agriculture.
Other faculty partners in this initiative include: Jason Herlands (associate professor, Modern Languages and Literature and East Asian Studies), Kelly Parker (professor of Philosophy and Liberal Studies and Director of the Environmental Studies Program), Santos Ramos (assistant professor, Liberal Studies), Brent Smith (associate professor and Assistant Chair of Liberal and Religious Studies), Jody Vogelzang (assistant professor of Allied Health Sciences and Director of the Masters of Clinical Dietetics Program), and Deana Weibel (professor of Anthropology and Liberal/Religious Studies).
For more information, contact Dr. Sarah King.