Education
The Center’s education work serves audiences ranging from elementary school students on field trips to the Garden Classroom, to graduate students who use the Center’s facilities for their field work. Through conferences, workshops, and publications, the Center reaches academics, researchers, students, and the general public with information about sustainable agriculture and food systems.
The Center has also taken a lead role in developing curriculum resources for those teaching about sustainable agriculture at the college and university level, and helped organize the first national-level conference on post-secondary sustainable agriculture education. In addition, Center staff members have produced internationally recognized instructional resources for those teaching organic farming, gardening, and marketing skills.
The Agroecology Practicum, a UCSC Summer Session course based at the UCSC Farm, is open to all qualified students and offers upper-division credit in Environmental Studies.
Opportunities for UCSC Students
As part of UC Santa Cruz's Division of Social Sciences, the Center serves as a resource for UCSC graduate and undergraduate students interested in a variety of topics, including:
- agroecology
- urban agriculture
- domestic and international food systems
- sustainable agriculture
- agricultural policy
- landscape ecology
- food security
The Center's facilities and programs are available to all UC Santa Cruz undergraduate and graduate students. In addition to class work based at the Center's facilities, students can take part in ongoing Center research and education efforts, design their own projects in collaboration with the Center's affiliated faculty and staff members, and apply to the Center's competitive grants program to fund their research. Students also work with the Center through internships or independent studies developed in collaboration with faculty in a variety of campus departments, including Community Studies, Education, Environmental Studies, and Latin American and Latino Studies.
See these related links for more information on undergraduate and graduate student opportunities.
