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Running Head: LITERACY IN ECONOMIC DOMAIN
Navigating educational reforms: Reflections on stimulating literate student agency in the
economic domain
George L. Boggs
Florida State University
email: glboggs@fsu.edu
phone: (850)644-4880
fax: (850)644-7736
Hilda E. Kurtz
The University of Georgia
email: hkurtz@uga.edu
LITERACY IN ECONOMIC DOMAIN
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Abstract
This paper grounds 21st century literacy instruction economically. Abstract and
workforce preparation oriented economic rationales for 21st century literacies create a
domain for curriculum research on social, especially economic, significance of student
action, but reform narratives lack economic rationales for designing literacy instruction.
Using sociocultural theories of language and social practice, we characterized student
projects in five iterations of a service-learning course by their degree of connection
(networked or insulated) to systems of economic exchange and their manner of
participation (direct or mediated) in economic activities. We found that service-learning
students embraced a wide variety of organizational and communicative means to
accomplish required and student generated projects; within each semester, projects
tended to increase in connectedness to networks of economic exchange and increase
slightly in directness of participation in production, distribution, and consumption of
goods and services. While each course include what one student referred to as “typical
academic activities,” characterized as insulated and mediated with respect to economic
life, students working together with the support of disciplinary concepts demonstrated
economically significant literacy-supported agency in the economic domain. These
findings confirm the importance of authentic learning experiences and underline the need
for careful interpretation of economic narratives underpinning educational reform.
Keywords: 21st century literacies, economics, disciplinary literacies, educational reform,
funds of knowledge
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“The distortions of our language help make us helpless” (Sharp, 2011, n.p.).
In Gulliver’s Travels (2009/1726-7), Swift’s professors portray frivolous
academia through their inane research efforts to improve literacy and the food system—
the most developed episode incorporates both at once. Touché! say the literacy and local
food researchers. The fatuous linguist sought to revolutionize literacy by having folks
carry the things themselves like sheep and England instead of words and sounds; his
stuffy and unfeasible response to the complex intersections of language, politics, and
economics is meant to amuse. The joke—that language is transcendently efficient,
indispensible for its ability to symbolize abstractly—has a double edge, for language and
even thinking are entangled economically. Well into Swift‘s lifetime, world powers
enriched themselves through mercantile trade restrictions: Raw materials in,
manufactured goods out; silver and gold in, never out. Read in the context of
mercantilism past its prime, Swift’s satire combines the interconnectedness of literacy
and economic existence with the unwillingness of researchers to get real about it.
Economic abstractions backed up by employers’ pleas for skilled writers and problem
solvers are currently driving educational reform in the research gap between new means
of communication and economically relevant literacy instruction. “Magical thinking”
(Labaree, 2012) about this convergence of economy and education ultimately leaves
teachers holding the bag—to design instruction “for jobs that do not yet exist” (Dede,
2010). In response, this paper situates literacy practices in the context of emergent
economic realities to foster relevant curriculum design decisions (Rutkowski, Rutkowski,
& Langfelt, 2011).
Swift pilloried the destructive consequences for humans, animals, and nature of
an economic system past its prime, and he lamented sorry institutional efforts to adjust.
High status educational reform imperatives today shape and are shaped by the
financialization of higher education, a shift in emphasis toward returns on investment at
the expense of other measurements of productivity (Au, 2011). A key critical agenda is
therefore to respond to and accommodate high status educational reform narratives in a
way that positions teachers and students to resist the economic and social forces from
which the reform imperatives emanate (21st Century Schools, 2010; Laitsch, 2013). This
paper reports on our efforts to do so in the context of a service-learning course centered
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on food justice. In the course, we draw attention to the problem of communication,
strategy, and seeking justice among multiple stakeholders with a variety of expectations,
while a significant fraction of our audiences—the public, the state and federal
government, and the university—becomes increasingly fixated on economic growth. The
need to navigate these tensions highlights conundrums with language a la Gulliver’s
Travels, and spurs critical reflection on the economic relevance of 21st century literacies.
It is not hard to offer economic competitiveness for labor markets as a rationale
for educational reform, but an abstract crisis narrative like global competition needs to be
unpacked (Voogt & Roblin, 2012). In this paper, we discuss a theoretical basis for
economically-minded literacy education and describe our method of researching the
economic significance of student work in a series of service-learning courses. We then
evaluate student work in light of core dimensions of economic participation, relation to
networks of exchange and manner of engagement in economic activity. A relationship
between economic relevance of coursework and the development of 21st century
literacies is examined as a way of thinking about current instructional practices. We
engage these issues in hopes of probing and reconciling contradictions inherent in
powerful economic metanarratives currently asserting such control over educational
practice. As we endeavor to ‘get real’ about the interconnectedness of literacy and (21st
century) economic existence, we invite questioning of our motives, process, and
conclusions.
21st Century Literacies
21st century literacies described by the National Council of Teachers of English (2013,
Figure 1) and closely related to 21st century competences and skills identified in literally
thousands of publications annually emphasize the ability to collaborate and solve
problems rather than the possession of a static body of knowledge (Voogt & Roblin,
2012). Likewise, open-ended preparation for a workforce of possibility is prized over
vocational training or disciplinary specialization (Dede, 2010). Reform advocates point to
many types of dysfunction as the impetus for changing literacy education, most often the
mismatch between school learning and workforce needs (Kay, 2008; Kellner, 2000;
P21.org, 2011). Nationalistic rationales for improving literacy education warn of losing a
competitive edge to eager outsiders in a global market, while global development models
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use free market rationales to argue for the common good. However, free market
rationales for 21st century literacies education mask the emergence of a transnational neomercantile system in which concentrated wealth and concentrated political power
mutually support one another at the expense of consumers, producers, and distributors of
goods and services (Labaree, 2012). The effect on education is that abstract economic
models supplant other models of productivity. For teachers, there is intense pressure to
build and update literacy instruction out of blind faith in a connection between literacy
and the economy. The economic anti-rationale will breed resistance; what’s worse is it
offers little guidance for fostering literate student agency.
-------------------------Insert Figure 1 about here
-------------------------While contemporary literacy practices recognizably respond to technological
changes in the way information is created, communicated, enhanced, and put to use, and
might seem to embrace the democratization of knowledge production, such commitments
are belied by the free-market rationales used in support of 21st Century Literacies, The
Partnership for 21st Century Schools, and the Common Core State Standards Initiative
(P21.org, 2011; CCSI, 2012; Voogt & Roblin, 2012). Economic thinking that motivates
21st century skills reform does not practically embrace the depth of the paradigmatic
changes brought on by soaring food costs, climate change, unemployment, and austerity
measures worldwide. Likewise, seemingly cutting-edge return-on-investment models,
tied invariably to test scores, graduation rates, or employment, are inarticulate with
respect to literacy instruction (Voogt & Roblin, 2012), often reinforcing antithetical
teaching practices (Au, 2011).
The problem for developing instruction around these new literacy and economic
practices is formidable. First, economic changes are continually demanding new modes
of interacting, so it is fruitless merely to “train” students in the use of the latest
communication gadgets. Second, economic changes go deeper than changes in the
constitution of the global workforce; the housing crisis, blended consumerism, and social
activism, and local food movements are only a few areas in which radical economic
change bursts the labor market paradigm for curriculum design. Third, like new wine in
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old wineskins, the policies underwriting contemporary structural change in secondary and
post-secondary education originate in archaic models of workforce preparation rather
than emergent economic life (Duff, 2008).
Literacy education cannot be evaluated solely by the likelihood of getting some
child some job someday, and it cannot be graded based on students’ use of internet
communicative tools (Hennessy, Ruthven, & Brindley, 2005). Economic environments
that literacies help create and transform should figure in as well. This paper explores
ideas about what we can do as instructors to stimulate literate student agency in the
economic domain beyond workforce development. Our goal is to step back with the
bigger economic picture in mind, and consider the manipulation of local economic
environments as a fundamental property of literate life in the 21st century. To
accomplish this larger goal we accept the premise that literacy practices and even
thinking are part of economic reality, and, since we cannot fulfill our responsibility as
teachers merely by training our students for a known workforce, we seek to understand
the emergent, local, economic consequences of 21st century literacies in the context of
school-based learning.
Theoretical Framework
Critical Funds of Knowledge
This paper employs the foundational notion of language as a cultural tool from
Vygotskian (1987) sociocultural theory to recognize opportunities for mutual assistance
between school and community. People’s literacy signifies “ability to use literary skills to
manipulate their environment efficiently and productively” (González, Moll, & Amanti,
2005, p. 65). Outside of school, literacies—flexible sets of culturally situated
resources—are deployed every day in ways that affect local economic security. This
study focuses on community development opportunities originating in school, supported
by the resources of a discipline, instructor, and others, and schematizes the economic
significance of students’ major activities that make up a university service-learning
course.
The notion of situated literacies (Barton & Papen, 2010) has been used to show
that literacies are economically embedded social practices that serve people’s day-to-day
needs. As they worked to bring about change on behalf of working poor US-Mexican
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families, González, Moll, and Amanti (2005) accepted that literacy education is good
because it offers people entrée into formal employment in primary labor markets (p. 58),
but they also recognized that economic activity goes far beyond participation in labor
markets. Literacy education can be good for a million other reasons, many clustered
around improved community economic stability.
Affordances and constraints
This analysis of 21st century literacies in an academic discipline focuses on the
economic significance of student activity in a course. The research is rooted in the
notion that tools such as language and communicative technologies have actual and
perceived affordances and constraints (Gibson, 1979). An affordance describes a
potential for action posed by objects, the potential for harnessing objects such as
technologies for our assertive will (Ryder & Wilson 1996). Constraints refer to the real
or perceived limitations on the use of an object for a given purpose. Here, we use
affordances and constraints in relation to literacies as well as the communication
technologies associated with them. For example, writing online affords communicating
across geographical and some temporal boundaries, while writing on a tree trunk affords
transcendence of temporal boundaries yet constrains global sharing. Social media tools
afford distribution of a photograph of the otherwise bounded inscription to millions. 21st
Century Literacies and skills education privileges the literate use of multiple, changing
communicative technologies because of their affordances for participation in emergent
social networks with vast potential for economic impact.
Teachers often struggle to align students’ low view of the affordances of literacy
(e.g., toil, wasting time, winning tokens of school success) with its potential (e.g.,
persuading, contributing to public discourse, advertisement). Limited literacy constrains
action as suggested by the expression “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks
like a nail.” With acquisition of a more robust literacy comes the ability to perform
actions afforded by the literacy’s tools. We proceed from the premise that literacy
practices shape and are shaped by economic conditions and relations; that is, among
actions afforded by literacy is the ability to respond to and shape economic conditions.
We define literate student agency, then, as the ability to select and use symbolic systems
strategically to manipulate an environment. Our task is thus to examine the role of
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literacy in helping students identify relevant environments to manipulate and relevant
tools with which to manipulate them as they respond to economic vulnerabilities and
opportunities. Students in our study were attempting to respond to locally experienced
economic vulnerabilities by supporting the local food movement and increasing access to
quality, affordable food. To that end, we drew students’ attention to the problem of
communication, strategy, and seeking justice among multiple stakeholders.
Economic impact analysis
Examining the ways in which 21st century literacies afford students’ participation
in and manipulation of local food economies offers a way to inscribe locally sustainable
instructional directives into the global competition imperatives that underpin 21st century
educational reform. In the following analysis, we plot course activities according to
schematized economic properties, asking how directly student actions relate to the
conditions of local food access and to what degree they are mediated by institutional or
other apparatuses? In other words, are student activities insulated from (economic/food
access) conditions in the local communities, or are they networked with/among other
stakeholders? Do student activities directly produce economic goods and services, or is
their economic participation indirect?
This analysis does not put a dollar amount on economic impact of student
activities. The value of the analysis is in schematizing economic engagement and
integrating economic thinking into 21st century literacies education. We suggest that
such an analysis reveals more about curricula than typical return on investment
calculations based on graduation rates (e.g., Communities in Schools, 2012).
Method
Context
Local food system. Renewed interest in local food systems as social contexts,
labor markets, objects of study, and means of social change and protest has sparked the
development of food-oriented courses in various departments and colleges within the
university where this research is being conducted. The town boasts a vibrant local food
system, but participation appears to be very uneven in terms of the socioeconomic
backgrounds. In recognition of the broader implications of a food system beyond farmers’
markets and restaurants with local offerings, instructors and students in human geography
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developed a course aimed at addressing food system disparities through an ethic of
mutual aid.
Course. The course invited students to read about suffering caused by paternalistic
and unilateral solutions to poverty and hunger as a basis for developing ideas about
mutually supported community action. The course was designed in 2007 as a servicelearning based intervention in disparate access to healthy and affordable food
within/across the local community. The course creates an opportunity for students to
engage critically with problems of hunger and food insecurity in the community through
group service learning projects supported by discussion-based academic work and
reflective writing. In 2011, the course was incorporated into a food studies-related
certificate program that provides a strong suite of courses and numerous service learning
and internship opportunities to position students to contribute to the development of
vibrant alternative food initiatives (Allen, et al. 2003).
The course, taught five times during the study, was focused on community
engagement to increase access to affordable, healthy food. The Urban Food Collective
(UFC) adopted the motto “Direct learning through direct action.” The course satisfied
majors’ and instructors’ intention to have an experiential course on food issues in human
geography, with a focus on structural change, as opposed to charitable food relief
services such as soup kitchens. Students were invited to read about global and local food
insecurity, about how food relief programs perpetuated local instability, and about the
importance of avoiding paternalistic approaches to community development.
Participants. Three course instructors, who took turns, approached the course and
local community engagement with different syllabi, philosophical positions, and prior
experience. They agreed on the necessity of students deciding how, why, and with whom
to engage. Thirty-five student participants included 50% human geography majors, 5%
graduate students. Students were typically in their second year or beyond, and most
described themselves as successful in school.
Data
Physical artifacts of student work included documents, photographs, field notes,
and publicity generated by participants and press agencies. Syllabi from the UFC courses
were collected as well as syllabi from food-related traditional format courses. Study
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participants, with six exceptions, provided initial and exit interviews. Classroom
discussions and select meetings outside class were audio recorded and transcribed. These
data enabled us to identify and characterize student action, the major projects that
students undertook. Each semester’s projects (Figure 2) could then be categorized in
relation to economic development characteristics and later examined with respect to the
affordances and constraints of 21st century literacies.
-------------------------------Insert figure 2 about here
-------------------------------Analysis. We subjected the student projects that made up each UFC course to
schematic economic analysis. The diagram below (Figure 3) represents economic
activity visually, as an aid in thinking about desirable educational goals and experiences.
Figure 3 shows an economic conceptualization of course projects in terms of two key
dimensions. Course projects were categorized with respect to their connectedness to
exchange markets and the directness of their economic activity. Student projects were
deemed either insulated from or networked to exchange contexts and either directly
producing, distributing, or consuming goods and services or affecting economic activity
in highly mediated ways.
We further distinguished the categories by low and high degree. Working
clockwise from the top around Figure 3, for direct economic activity, the scale of
production could be small or large. For networked actions, low and high connectedness
was determined according to the necessity of the network to the action. Mediated,
indirect economic participation was subdivided again into the large or small scale of
influence. More and less insulated actions were distinguished by avoidance of networking
versus exercises in connectedness nonetheless separated from networks beyond the
classroom.
------------------------------Insert figure 3 about here
------------------------------Course initiatives (UFC I-V) were plotted in relation to the two axes and in terms
of their degree, high and low (Figure 4). Such visualization affords examination of the
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role of 21st century literacies and reflection upon the economic significance of other
courses we teach.
An Economic View of Student Action
Plotting course activities according to their economic properties reveals economic
impact of curricula at a finer, more informative resolution compared with return on
investment calculations based on graduation rates (e.g., Communities in Schools, 2012).
Activities in the courses transcended the domain of typical school activities, whose
economic value is too often restricted to the lower left quadrant, that is, insulated and
highly mediated in terms of economic participation.1 Moreover, within each of the five
iterations of the UFC course is a progression over time from insulated, mediated action
toward a combination of direct and mediated networked action, with a general movement
from left to right.
-----------------------------Place Figure 4 about here
--------------------------------------------------------Place Figure 5 about here
----------------------------------------------------------Place Figure 6 about here
-----------------------------21st century literacies and economic relevance
A graph of UFC I-V action provides an opportunity to understand the role of 21st
century literacies in the courses’ economic significance (Figure 8, above), and to grasp
why “new literacies are central to full civic, economic, and personal participation in a
global community” (International Reading Association, 2009). Technologically literate
communication permeated even the most traditional forms of classroom activity. Many
students accessed digital copies of required readings. Discussions of readings were
1
It is instructive to note how commonly schools coercively position students economically (e.g., as
consumers of textbooks, producers of fundraising revenue) while schooling rarely positions students
as agentive producers for audiences beyond the classroom. A notable exception is Uzbek public
education, where students are required annually to harvest cotton by hand.
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enriched, from time to time, by popular culture references, acknowledgements of
contributions from other fields, and media representation of issues. Discussions were
periodically interrupted by requests for web links, listserv addresses, online documents,
and phone numbers. However, students observed a threshold in class meetings that
corresponds with analysis of economic significance: Discussion of readings gave way,
within each class meeting and from beginning to end of each semester, to discussion of
community engagement. In UFC II, a massive community food assessment project
eclipsed the readings for several weeks. Late in semesters I, IV, and V, the instructor
placed discussions at the end of class in order to allow necessary time for course projects.
In this way, what one student described as “typical academic activities" (i.e., reading,
discussion, and writing) faded into the background over time, while 21st century
literacies became indispensable to student projects.
While the courses placed a premium on student ownership of their learning, and
thus, indirectly, on the literacies that make less-hierarchical collaborative learning
possible, the application of 21st century literacies to the problems in question pushed
economic significance of initiatives toward networks of interested parties, a major
concern of Common Core State Standards for literacy (CCSSI, 2012)
Literacies and economically significant action intersected in the engagementoriented course format, a phenomenon represented with some irony in Jairus’ account of
writing an article for a newspaper in UFC IV:
Well my part [of the article] was the last section, right before we asked people to
come to [the activist networking session]. [Pause] This class was one of my
favorites. Going to miss this class. I don’t want to put any dirt on [UFC III], but
this class was a lot better. We were not so much in the books, but in the
community trying to get stuff done.
Contrasting conceptualizations of traditional school literacy throw light on the affordance
of 21st century literacies (e.g., identifying stakeholders, building networks,
communicating purposively) for extending economic impact. In fact the article he helped
write put him in the community in a way that he had never experienced before, even in a
prior UFC course. The point is that as students and policymakers increasingly demand
authentic, useful capabilities as the end goal of education, the affordances and constraints
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of literate practices must be evaluated in ways that connect learners with the
environments their literacy enables them to manipulate.
Discussion
Course actions identified in Figure 1 required participants to negotiate among
many approaches to a problem. The occurrence of most of those initiatives late in each
semester, together with the rushed way that many wound up taking place, suggests a
thread interweaving unstructured tasks, ‘real-world’ problems, and the opportunity and
pressure to do something of lasting value locally. Networked, mediated economic activity
evident in community outreach efforts depended heavily on 21st century literacies, as sets
of tools helping participants and community members understand and act in response to
the problem of food insecurity. “Typical school activities” like writing papers and
discussing readings should not be valued less because they are less directly involved and
networked with economic structures, but economic analysis can help describe the
artificial limitations teachers and schooling often place on students. Economically
isolated and mediated projects are often transformed as 21st century literacies reposition
the classroom as a staging area for purposive interactions that bridge school and
community concerns. Unfortunately, school often remains a kind of dry swim: a highly
abstract, tenuous, and unfocused setting in which what students produce or exchange has
little value beyond classroom or school. Nonetheless, our economic evaluation constructs
action whose economic impact is insulated and mediated as a potentially vital transitional
phase. The left to right and bottom to top economic movement we tracked in each
semester demonstrates the potential and importance of using typical academic activities
as a research and development phase rather than permanent state of isolation.
It may be hard to envision the widespread reification of school as un-real, but a
graduate student participant offered a glimpse of the scope of the problem when he
reported radical differences in community reception to his ideas depending on whether he
identified himself as a student or member of a community action organization. His youth
didn’t matter. His network did. Figure 6, above offers one explanation for why
community members expect little from students in school.
Fundamentally, Internet communicative tools blur the division between novice
children and competent adults when it comes to a) community participation and b)
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collective action. These accompanying literacies enable them to manipulate their worlds
with a range of potential for impact, including economic growth. Economic development
in this study consists mainly of expanding the local food system, which has been shown
to correlate significantly with increased local employment and personal income (Martinez,
et al, 2010). Complementary factors, such as health, nutrition, reduced crime, and
community solidarity have been similarly related.
Educators and researchers need to develop strategies for understanding how
actions, and even thinking, are embedded in economic systems. One participants’
response to a peer’s question concerning vegetable varieties encapsulates this need:
Aaron said, “I thought it was interesting how you express your fathers’ position that
commonly available varieties of tomatoes served their purposes, but whose purposes,
why?” Aaron’s question might be evaluated positively from a range of disciplinary
perspectives due to its awareness of bias and critical thinking. Too often, the goal of
academic disciplines to serve the common good is needlessly sacrificed to the project of
showing students the ropes. Aaron’s question was shaped by his internalization of
disciplinary concepts of scale, food system, commodity food, logistics, and marketing.
His literacies in Global Information Systems (GIS) technology and multiple
communicative platforms enabled him not only to pretend in school with authentic realworld problems, but to feed information to local food activists, speak to city commission
members, build restaurant networks to support local farmers, and write for the paper.
Far from treating economic development as an unquestioned good, however,
drawing attention to economic significance available through school settings
environments offers a unique opportunity to put flesh on the disembodied economic
imperatives driving secondary literacy instruction. A critical funds of knowledge
approach enables us to ask Which economy, whose growth, and whose security does the
acquisition of 21st century skills and literacies benefit? Whose goals are served by global
competition in labor markets? The findings of this research confirm the importance of
21st century literacies, but they represent a challenge to global competition as the reason
for employing them. The scale at which we choose to view economic development
matters a great deal to the vitality of communities and households, and, as demonstrated
here, the potential for 21st century literacies education.
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Figures
Figure 1. National Council of Teachers of English Definition of 21st Century Literacies
Active, successful participants in this 21st century global society must be able to
 Develop proficiency and fluency with the tools of technology;
 Build intentional cross-cultural connections and relationships with others to pose
and solve problems collaboratively and strengthen independent thought;
 Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of
purposes;
 Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information;
 Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts;
 Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments
(NCTE, 2013).
Figure 2. Urban Food Collective course action, by semester.
UFC I
A. Read and discussed course readings
B. Maintained reflective journal
C. Cultivated rooftop garden
D. Distributed food via Food Not Bombs community partner
E. Supported local school’s community engagement (garden installation and supplies,
food production education, outreach)
F. Produced local food news ‘zine’ with interviews
G. Hosted Movie Night
H. Co-constructed four single-family gardens in low-income neighborhood
I. Co-constructed school and homeless shelter gardens
UFC II
A. Read and discussed course readings
B. Cultivated rooftop garden
C. Distributed food to various recipients in and out of class
D. Composed Community Food Assessment
E. Hosted Community Supper to encourage local food system participation
UFC III
A. Read and discussed course readings
B. Participated in online class discussion forum
C. Cultivated rooftop garden
D. Distributed food to homeless shelter and among students
E. Developed and publicized mayoral petition detailing expansion of local food
system
F. Conducted ‘Fun with Food’ weekly afterschool program (created cookbook,
participatory food demonstrations, and gardens at four community centers)
G. Composed academic paper and presentation on aspect of local food system
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LITERACY IN ECONOMIC DOMAIN
20
UFC IV
A. Read and discussed course readings
B. Maintained reflective journal
C. Cultivated rooftop garden
D. Distributed food in various ways
E. Publicly protested public space food restrictions via garden display, potluck, and
public forum
F. Founded Campus Kitchens, a food reclamation program
G. Distributed plants propagated by UFC members and others to school and
community gardens
H. Co-constructed school garden
I. Composed articles to raise awareness of local food system issues
J. Coordinated activist networking summit
UFC V
A. Read and discussed course readings
B. Collaboratively maintained topical journals
C. Cultivated rooftop garden
D. Distributed food in various ways
E. Canvassed neighborhoods to build support for community garden
Figure 3. Two dimensions of economic impact.
Direct
Isolated
Networked
Mediated
Figure 4. Course Activities from Fig 3—Insulated or Connected (x-axis) and Mediated or
Direct (y-axis).
UFC I Projects
20
LITERACY IN ECONOMIC DOMAIN
21
Direct
Isolated
Is
ol
at
ed
Networked
Mediated
UFC II Projects
Direct
Isolated
Networked
Mediated
UFC III Projects
Direct
Isolated
Networked
Mediated
UFC IV Projects
Direct
Isolated
Networked
Mediated
21
LITERACY IN ECONOMIC DOMAIN
22
UFC V Projects
Direct
Isolated
Networked
Mediated
Figure 5. Combined Graph: Connectedness and Directness of Course Action, UFC I-V
2
Direct
1
Isolated
-2
Networked
0
-1
0
1
2
-1
-2
Mediated
Figure 6. Comparand: Course Action from Syllabi in Three Related Courses in Human
Geography taught by the same instructor.
2
Direct
1
Isolated
-4
Networked
0
-2
0
2
4
-1
-2
Mediated
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