Progress 09/15/23 to 09/14/24
Outputs
Target Audience:During the 2023-2024 reporting period, undergraduate and graduate students in food history and public administration constituted ourprimary target audience. These students sought horticultural training to prepare for leadership careers in community agriculture and in urban planning, and the Milpa Agricultural Placemaking Project at the University of North Texas provided them with these opportunities through our curricular partnerships with the Texas A&M University's Urban Agriculture Lab in Dallas, Texas, and the Shiloh Field Community Garden in Denton, Texas. On the public outreach side, our students also began developinga broader audience of farmers, restauranteurs, and other food and agriculturalprofessionals across north Texas through their work interviewing members of these communities in ouroral history project. On the planning and development side, our students and faculty participants convened a publicaudience of campus and community stakeholders in three preparatory meetings to gather input on our proposals to build anedible landcape. Changes/Problems:One of our co-PIs, Dr. Nathan Hutson, resigned his position as Assistant Professor at the University of North Texas toward the end of this reporting period. He has agreed to continue his work on this project as a consultant, however, a change to our project that we plan to request in the new reporting period. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Training opportunities during this reporting period included two undergraduate courses in community agriculture and urban planning, as well as one undergraduate and two graduate courses in food and agricultural history.Students in these courses also received hands-on horticultural training in our activities with our off-campus partners, Texas A&M's urban agriculture lab and the Shiloh Field Community Garden. Professional development opportunities during the reporting period included student-led efforts to create the MAPP Oral History Project and to runmeetings on Milpa site locations.Three undergraduate students and one graduate student serving as our program'scommunity agriculture scholars also provided additional technical support for these professional development efforts. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Our primary outreach method during this first year has been to spread information with the publicthrough our oral history project.The interviews conducted by our students have averaged around 60 minutes each, which provides time for compelling conversations and stories about food and agriculture in north Texas to emerge. One common outcome from the interview process is the generation of new leads for other members of the public to interview. In this manner we have been able to spread news of our project with a targeted audience of farmers and community agriculture participants through an effective word-of-mouth approach. As we enter our second year we are developing a website to feature these oral histories in order to provide an archive that is free and accessible to the public. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?Our plansfor the next reporting period include: 1- Curricular goals include the creation of a new undergraduate "Horticultural Histories of North Texas" course. 2- Initial planting of at least two edible landscape sites on the UNT campus. 3- Selection of a first round of cultivars for the North Texas Heritage Seed Library and the coordination of aspring seedling giveaway. 4- Outreach goals include the production of a project website featuring the oral history archive, and the creation of educational videos documenting cultivars from the North Texas Heritage Seed Library.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
Our main accomplishment during the first year of this project has been the creation and coordination of an interdisciplinary and interinstitutional curriculum between history, public administration, and agricultural sciences that did not previously exist on our campus. Our new partnerships with Texas A&M's urban agricultural lab and with the Shiloh Field community garden have provided our students at UNT with access to horticultural training in both indoor and outdoor settings. This new curriculum directly benefitted 47 undergraduate students and 24 graduate students during the reporting year, and provided our faculty and staff with the experience to scale up those numbers in following years. Another accomplishment during this first reporting year was the creation of the MAPP Oral History Archive ofinterviews with North Texas farmers to document stories about food and agriculture and to help us identify shared community interests and concerns as we move forward with further curricular development and the construction ofan ediblelandscape and agricultural learning lab on our campus. We also made progress on our student recruiting efforts, supporting three undergraduate agricultural placemaking scholars with financial awards, one graduate MAstudent research assistant, and bringing two new PhD students to UNT, both of whom began their first year of study at UNT just as this reporting window closed. The first of these PhD students, Basmah Arshad, holds an MA in Museum Studies from the University of Michigan and will be conducting her PhD researchon the food and agricultural historiesof South Asian immigrant communities throughout north Texas. The second PhD student, Miguel Velis, is a Culinary Institute of Dallas trained chef who holds an MBA from UT-Arlington as well as an MA in Sustainable Tourism, and whoseresearch will be focused on culinary tourism and community agricultural development. On the urban planning side, our student-ledeffort to identify initial planting sitesfor our edible landscape project culminated in a list of preferred locations approved by our campusfacilities team.?
Publications
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