Prof. Nxumalo wins federal funding to launch a project on climate-responsive school gardening in South Africa

The inspiration for Fikile Nxumalo’s most recent climate justice project emerged from funded research in her home country of Eswatini, in Southern Africa.

As part of this research – funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) – children, families, elders, teachers, and community-based agronomists engaged in intergenerational dialogues on the effects of climate change, particularly focusing on the revitalization of Indigenous foods not only as a response to climate change but also as acts of decolonization. Building on these dialogues, the community worked together on an Indigenous food school garden.

By bringing together the agronomists’ Western scientific knowledge with the community’s ecological knowledges, while also listening to children’s ideas, this project showed the potential of climate change adaptation that is co-designed with communities.

When Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund announced the call for the 2023 International Joint Initiative for Research in Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation competition, it presented a wonderful opportunity for Dr. Nxumalo to expand on the work in Eswatini because the call specified a focus on co-designing climate change responses with disproportionally impacted communities.

Nxumalo, an OISE associate professor, is the principal investigator of a new community-based co-design research project that brings together climate science with Indigenous and Local Ecological Knowledges (ILEK) to develop climate-smart Indigenous food gardens in primary schools in South Africa. The project will work in three South African ecoregions located in KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng, and Limpopo provinces.

“I'm always interested in bringing anti-colonial perspectives to issues of environmental precarity,” said Nxumalo, who is based in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning. “There is knowledge in communities that should be central when designing responses to climate change, including educational responses. This is what this project is aiming to do by bringing much-needed diversity of knowledges in designing climate change adaptation.

“The project also seeks to support climate literacy that is interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and community-based.”

“This is an ambitious project,” she added, “for instance, our design circles from the very beginning have multi-generational community members, local government partners, and climate scientists in the same space together as co-researchers along with other members of our research team who have wide-ranging expertise including in garden-based science learning, agricultural sciences, child health, and climate justice education.”

Dr. Nxumalo’s research partners in South Africa and the United States are funded by the South Africa-based National Research Foundation and U.S.-based National Science Foundation, bringing the total funded amount for the three-year project to over $2 million CAD. Alongside community, school and local government collaborators, Dr. Nxumalo is grateful to be working with an interdisciplinary team of researchers, including South Africa principal investigator Professor Busi Nkonki-Mandleni and American principal investigator Professor Tia Madkins.

“Sometimes work that's done in the Global South, once the researchers leave and the project is done – that's the end of it,” she explains. “With this project, we are working with a theory of change that can not only sustain the food gardens when the project formally ends, but that also can continue to grow and spread the climate adaptation knowledges that are already there and that will emerge as a result of the research support.

“This also means that we are co-designing for impact beyond the school sites that we will work with. We also hope for impact at policy levels in terms of supporting scaled community responses.”

For Professor Nxumalo, this new project is a part of a shift in her research focus that began with her work in Eswatini. Her scholarship focuses on anti-colonial and anti-racist environmental education but has been primarily centred on early childhood education contexts. Within her previous SSHRC project in Eswatini and the current NFRF-funded project, she has shifted to working with Grade 1 to 4 students and at a much larger scale.

“I haven't had the opportunity to do much school-based work, although this project is still with younger children,” she says. “I’m excited to grow my work in this way, particularly by working intergenerationally with communities in ways that centre Indigenous and local ecological knowledges, and that shift the dominant position that Western science has when we think about responding issues of climate and environment.”