Forest Food Gardens: Communities, Ecologies and Collaboration (X5701E)

15 credits, Level 5

Spring teaching

On this module, you’ll collaborate on group activities for the campus forest food garden. You’ll garden, design parts of the planting and garden infrastructure, and implement plans. This includes water solutions, mushroom cultivation and ground cover planning.

You’ll connect these tasks of food growing and questions of land use, to wider political themes. Through this, you’ll work imagine alternative futures and think about how small actions contribute to bigger change.

You’ll also examine:

• the messy, complex realities of working in food systems
• climate change and biodiversity loss
• how to engage wider groups in sustainability issues, using creative and practical approaches.

You’ll finish with the knowledge and real-world experience of supporting local communities and the wider world for the better.

Contact hours and workload

This module is approximately 150 hours of work. This breaks down into about 44 hours of contact time and about 106 hours of independent study. The University may make minor variations to the contact hours for operational reasons, including timetabling requirements.

We regularly review our modules to incorporate student feedback, staff expertise, as well as the latest research and teaching methodology. We’re planning to run these modules in the academic year 2025/26. However, there may be changes to these modules in response to feedback, staff availability, student demand or updates to our curriculum.

We’ll make sure to let you know of any material changes to modules at the earliest opportunity.