In this essay, Kate Cairns considers the implications of assessing garden pedagogies, arguing that a rhetoric of effects assumes an essentialist conception of the child-as-educational-output and bolsters a neoliberal vision of social change rooted in personal transformation. Drawing from ethnographic research with youth gardens in Toronto,…

Employing Bourdieu's notion of social field, this research conceptualizes New Jersey's alternate route to teacher certification as a contested arena, in which the interests, ideologies, and visions of different stake-holders regarding the character of public education have collided. Findings for this study are primarily based on data from the New…