ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the politics of teaching farmworker justice in the context of land-grant universities (LGUs). Modeled on the OSU Farmworker Justice Movements course, the chapter begins with an overview the five organizations that comprise the comparative case studies of the course (United Farm Workers – UFW, Farm Labor Organizing Committee – FLOC, Pineros y Campesinos Unidos Noroeste – PCUN, Coalition of Immokalee Workers – CIW, and Migrant Justice/Justicia Migrante). Then, I discuss prior iterations of farmworker courses taught predominately at other LGUs and how they balanced the pressures of competing agri-food system interests, obliging students to service-learning projects, and curricular concerns such as transnationalism. Those prior courses were extremely influential on how we approached the design and teaching of our course, in addition to the requirements of the Difference, Power, and Discrimination program. Finally, I identify the experiential learning approach developed by ethnic studies scholars and implemented herein.
