PhD Project
My doctoral research focused on understanding and learning how to manage students' transience in university student-led food gardens.
Background
Student-led sustainability initiatives are increasingly championed as a method to foster pro-sustainability attitude and behaviour change. However, students are transient. That is, their degrees are time limited, and within their degrees they spend long periods away from the university for holidays, fieldwork, and so on. This has considerable impact on how they are managed. In spite ofthis, understandings of the impacts of transience are superficial and fragmented. Therefore, there isa need to better understand this phenomenon so student-led food gardens can be managed in order to achieve the aims they are proported to have.
AIMS
To better understand how students’ transience impacts university student-led food gardens and how these impacts might be managed, through:
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Reviewing academic literature to assess benefits of sustainable university community gardens
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Mapping the patterns of causes and effects related to students’ transience
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Evaluating the resilience of Student Eats gardens
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Exploring actions gardens’ stakeholders can take to address negative impacts of students’ transience and build resilience into the gardens
Key Findings
The main benefits of student-led food gardens are learning and education, according to the literature review.
The main type of learning/education that took place was not to do with fostering pro-sustainability attitudes/behaviours; rather it was more akin to process-oriented types of learning.
Transience caused problematic forms of participation (like short-term, irregular, and low participation).
The negative impacts of problematic participation actually increased problematic participation itself, resulting in a vicious cycle (e.g., less social interaction, caused by low participation, further lowered participation).
This indicates that strategies to address them impacts of transience should target both the causes and effects of problematic participation together since they are mutually reinforcing
Students and university/students’ union staff likely had different conceptions of time, which was a source of tension
Students thought of time in a linear way, whereas staff thought of time as being cyclical
The gardens were not very resilient to students’ transience, particularly because of:
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A lack of long-term participants
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A lack of gardener autonomy over the garden space (in some cases)
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Limited time allocation for university staff (especially grounds teams) to engage with students
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Periods of ’cliquey-ness’ within the garden groups
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A lack of trust between students and university staff (in some cases)
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A lack of ’embeddedness’ within university/students’ union structures
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A lack of monitoring of the quality of relationships between gardeners and students’union/university staff, the physical state of the garden, and the balance between an emphasis on recruitment vs the ’core’ gardening activities
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A lack of tolerance to uncertainty and ambiguity
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A lack of knowledge/skills retention within the gardens
A portfolio of strategies to address the impacts of students’ transience was developed which can be found in this report and this video.