The Food Justice course is a core course taken in the first semester of the students' master's degree program. Students who complete this course should be able to:

To scaffold student learning and engagement for these five learning outcomes, this 8-week course is divided into four, 2-week sessions: (1) Foundational Concepts, (2) (In)justices of Food Production, (3) Decolonizing Food Justice and Indigenous Diets, and (4) Sustainable Food Systems: Exploration and Critique. Course learning outcomes and corresponding activities are assessed through authentic and formative assessment (Wiggins, 1990; Fook and Sidhu, 2010). Course assignments attempt to bridge asynchronous, online learning with Hyflex inspired teaching (Kyei-Blankson and Godwyll, 2010).

Course activities strive to foster critical thinking and develop higher order understanding of power and oppression that underpin complex problems within contemporary food systems. Greeson facilitates a learning community by creating spaces for students to engage with course content through peer-to-peer dialogue. Course activities include: asynchronous online dialogue; semi-synchronous small group virtual meetings; blog posts; and an experiential learning project.

Experiential learning projects grounded in social justice and place-based praxis can be difficult to implement during an 8-week block and in an online program, especially when students encounter the course during their first semester. To accommodate project timelines, students meet with the instructor and develop project proposals during the first 2 weeks of the course. Students with reciprocal relationships are encouraged to collaborate with their community on a project, while students with minimal to no relationships are counseled to use the assignment to examine their positionality and as an opportunity to build relationships. Every other week students reflect on their projects in the blog post assignment and with their small groups.

The Food Justice course was not only designed to introduce students to food justice movements but the course intentionally centered pedagogical frameworks cognizant of intersectional approaches to food justice and food justice education. The next section describes our pedagogical approaches and offers tangible ways these frameworks can be implemented in a graduate level course.

Pedagogical frameworks focused on a culturally sustaining pedagogy were central to the course design, learning outcomes, and content development. An anti-racist, anti-colonial culturally sustaining approach leads students to unpack their positionalities in relation to (in)justices within food systems and ensures multiple voices and perspectives are heard and represented in the syllabus (Paris and Alim, 2017; Alim et al., 2020). Informed by Tuck and Yang (2012), we use the word anti-colonial to shift the onus as settlers attempting to dismantle colonial structures in education (Tuck et al., 2014). In doing so, these pedagogical approaches seek to address the Eurocentric epistemological dominance and colonial structures of the academy including the erasure of Queer and BIPOC voices in sustainable food system projects and scholarship (Ramírez, 2014; Leslie, 2017, 2019).

Food systems educators can critically examine whose voices are prioritized in academia and consequently in course syllabi (Smith and Garrett-Scott, 2021; Smith et al., 2021). Some things for educators to consider in syllabi development: Whose voices are being included and excluded in the scholarly conversation? Are educators including scholars with marginalized identities and food justice activists? What perspectives are needed to deepen the conversation? This is particularly important in food justice education, where folks who are marginalized within the food system “beyond institutionalized racism and white privilege” including gender, ethnic, class, ability, and sexual differences (Sbicca 2012, p. 36) are leading activism work.

These pedagogical approaches invite students to share their thoughts and think critically about the material and topics by including multiple perspectives, learning styles, and ways of knowing. To reconfigure the politics of knowledge and center food justice activism, there was a concerted effort to largely include BIPOC authorship and decolonizing or Queer standpoints, and students were offered scholarly and non-scholarly sources including multiple resource formats (e.g., peer review journals, podcasts, art). In the course design, students were encouraged to view activists from marginalized identities as experts whose knowledge ought to be valued in the academy.

Posthumanism challenges human-centered narratives and colonial curricula (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013, 2019; Bayley, 2018). The food justice movement and literature largely focus on human access to healthy, culturally appropriate foods; and human cost associated with inhumane working conditions in the food production industry (Gottlieb and Joshi, 2010; Food Chain Workers Alliance, 2012; Bauer and Stewart, 2013). This is appropriate, considering only 13.5% of all food workers surveyed reported earning a livable wage (Food Chain Workers Alliance, 2012). Despite the US's reliance on immigrant workers, H-2A program exploits and abuses non-citizens working within US food systems (Bauer and Stewart, 2013). Yet, liberation movements are increasingly called to understand the ways in which movements are not isolated from one another and that white supremacy and colonization underpin all forms of oppression. Ko argued Black liberation is inexplicably tied to animal rights, in that “our understanding of the world, our understanding of social categories, our understanding of ourselves have been birthed from a toxic, oppressive, colonized cultural womb” (Ko 2019, p. 17) and justice movements are underscored by white supremacy. Offering these counter-hegemonic narratives to dominant sustainable food system discourse allowed students to examine potentially harmful siloed thinking.

A post-humanist framework provides students with the opportunity to critically think about the anthropocentricity of justice work and the whiteness of alternative food movements (Breese, 2011). Specifically, incorporating literature on the more-than-human cost to contemporary food production (Stanescu, 2013) introduces students to the role more-than-humans play in traditional foodways such as traditional hunting and gathering (Kimmerer, 2013; Coté, 2016; Kagawa-Viviani et al., 2018). One of the four course sections (see section Course Design, above) centers Indigenous food sovereignty and decolonizing diets (Montgomery and Vaughan, 2018; Mihesuah, 2020). Students explored the ways Indigenous communities restore cultural knowledge and rights to determine their food systems. To consider the more-than-human interconnectedness in contemporary food systems is inherently tied to the decolonial project (see Salmón, 2000; TallBear, 2017), Indigenous food sovereignty, and perceptions of place as it relates to food and experiential learning projects.

The place-based experiential learning assignment asked students to develop and implement a project within students' communities (Harfitt and Chow, 2020). These projects are opportunities to anchor theory and content to real-world applications while integrating student-centered, interest driven learning, with critical place-based engagement (Gruenewald, 2003). Experiential learning reinforces critical thinking and provides students with depth and connection that otherwise might be challenging in online courses.

In this section, we reflect on student projects implemented both prior to and during the COVID19 pandemic. Teaching during a global pandemic—albeit in an online graduate program—shifted how we defined community engagement (Ramsey et al., 2020). We also recognize that these projects took place in communities all over the globe and will look different in different contexts. As such, instructors can support students by being emergent and reflexive. For example, in 2020, students developed projects that were mindful of social distancing restrictions to explore online communities or develop curriculum for communities of inquiry (Supplementary Table 2).

While experiential learning can be a powerful learning strategy in any course, it can be especially relevant for food justice-focused courses. These projects allow students to connect justice and activism with course content; however, often these projects might focus on communities marginalized by social and environmental injustices. Student-developed and implemented projects not only encourage students to engage and learn about their communities but also offer students opportunities to work toward being culturally responsive. It is through the project process that students begin to develop their academic identity, social justice eye, and community relationships.

Educators must guide students using social justice and culturally responsive teaching, to encourage students to work with communities (Freire, 2000; Rose and Paisley, 2012; Gallant et al., 2017). In one-on-one discussion with the instructor, students were guided in project development, and reminded to be conscientious of white savior narratives and to listen with humility. Rather than approaching a community or organization with their project ideas but as a collaboration—educators might ask students to think about ways scholars/learners can center folks that are marginalized by asking how these projects could benefit them. What is particularly important for educators and students is to be thoughtful that we may be causing unintentional harm to already oppressed groups and to be mindful of extractive practices (e.g., learning outcomes; Stoecker, 2016). Students practiced critical reflexivity (Evans et al., 2013) in relation to course content through bi-weekly blog assignments. As a result, some students focused on building relationships with communities as a first step for future collaboration.

Supplementary Table 2 lists select project titles implemented by students prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. As summarized in their titles, project topics were wide in scope and entirely place-based and learner-interest driven. Often these projects were developed within the students' professional arena, such as the workshop developed for the Agricultural Training Exchange Supporting Alaska Native Communities and the undergraduate food justice curriculum written for Food Justice: Education, Sustainability & Youth Engagement in Valencia College. Projects conducted before the pandemic generally had more face-to-face community involvement while projects during the pandemic required more creativity and flexibility. Students utilized a variety of media to disseminate their projects including but not limited to creative videos, social media infographics, formal presentations, podcasts, websites, and scholarly papers.