At Guilford, the class isn't always in a classroom

In the slanting sunshine of a recent fall afternoon, Joshua Brasswell ’28 is doing something he never imagined when he signed up for “Introduction to Food Systems”: splitting open pods of pinkeye purple hull peas on Guilford’s grassy Quad.

Joshua is a junior majoring in psychology. He hopes to become a guidance counselor or a childhood therapist. He enrolled because he needed a general education course, and the subject was unfamiliar enough to worry him, but interesting enough to pique his curiosity.

“I was nervous,” he says. “I don’t really know much about the food system, but that's part of college. Trying things that are different.”

Now he and his classmates are working through peas Bronwyn Tucker, their Sustainable Foods Professor, grew on her farm near Siler City, N.C. They open one pod, remove the peas and reach for another.

Bronwyn, who teaches in the College’s Environmental and Sustainability Studies Department,  could cover the same subject with a textbook reading and a PowerPoint. At Guilford, taking the lesson onto the Quad is instinctive. Her course, “Introduction to Food Systems,” also takes students off campus to meet people whose work they have studied.

Bronwyn brought the class outside because they are studying agricultural labor. As they discuss the reading, they do a little repetitive work themselves. Pick, snap, split. Pick, snap, split.

Of course an afternoon on the Quad cannot tell students what it means to depend on farmwork for a living. It can make them notice a step between the field and the dinner plate that most consumers never see. Who does this work? How long does it take? Under what conditions?

“They can learn about the crop and then experience the processing of it as a part of the food system,” Bronwyn says.

At a large state university, an undergraduate might take a course on food systems without ever visiting the people growing, processing or sharing food nearby. A class that can travel together, stop for a conversation and return to discuss what students saw depends on time and attention from its professor. Bronwyn has room to build her course that way at Guilford. Indeed, she has built four field trips into this semester alone.

On a recent visit to Saxapahaw, N.C., her class visited a butchery, where students learned how the shop sources animals from nearby farms and uses whole-animal seam butchery. They spoke with the owner about working with farmers, running the business and finding uses for the whole animal. They looked at the products and tasted some.

Joshua remembers the visit. He had known little about butchery; now he could describe some of the decisions made before meat reaches a customer.

The class also met someone who runs a community garden. Students asked what its volunteers grow, why they started the garden and where its donated harvest goes. One student received a watermelon to take home.

These encounters put people behind terms that can sound tidy in a classroom. Local food involves farmers, business owners and volunteers making choices with the resources they have. Students can read about those choices. In Saxapahaw, they could ask the people making them.

Bronwyn knows which lessons have stayed with her. In high school, a teacher took her class to rivers to study aquatic insects. They made a field guide and collected specimens. Later, as a Biology major, she studied ecology in Ecuador, spent time in the woods during a forest ecology course in the Pacific Northwest and studied marine biology in Oregon.

“I know my most meaningful experiences in college were ones where I got to go places and touch things,” she says.

She wants her students to have that chance, whatever they plan to study. Her class includes students majoring in International studies, Biology, Business Management, Sociology and Environmental Studies, along with Joshua in Psychology. Food gives all of them a way into questions about work, health, business and community.

Joshua grew up in Greensboro. His mother and grandparents attended N.C. A&T State University, and he once expected to follow them. He wanted to try somewhere different, though, and Guilford felt “calming and quiet” to him.

He says he’s found a home at Guilford and in Bronwyn’s class – both the indoor and outdoor version.

“I’m really enjoying things,” he says. “Every day is something different – somewhere different. I really do like it.”

There are ways to measure what a college teaches. There are courses completed and requirements met. Those records will show that Joshua took Introduction to Food Systems. They cannot quite show an afternoon on the Quad, or the conversation he had with a butcher, or the questions he may carry into his work with children and families someday.

Tucker has the freedom to build a course around experiences like those. “This is why I’m at Guilford,” she says. “I can’t teach any other way.”