Sowing Futures: A Community-Based Partnership for Learning about Urban Agriculture
A partnership with Detroit’s Corn Wine Oil Farms to design curriculum materials and resources to support youth learning about agriculture.
In collaboration with Detroit farmers and educators Candi and Mark Fentress of Corn Wine Oil Farms, we are exploring how young people within and outside of public schools learn to grow their own food and explore agriculture as a potential career.
Over the course of the summer in 2025, we developed "Sowing Futures," a set of curriculum materials designed to encourage youth interest in food, farming, and agriculture (Bautista et al., 2025). The curriculum includes units on five themes: Accessing Land, Feeding the Soil, Sowing and Growing, Garden-to-Table, and Careers in Agriculture. Each unit includes 3-4 lessons with facilitator guides and student-facing resources (e.g., handouts, articles, and graphic organizers).
Collectively, our goal with these curriculum materials is to encourage youth interest in food, farming, and agriculture; integrate agriculture, science, literacy, and math; include indoor and outdoor learning opportunities; and ensure personalized, empowering, culturally-affirming, and transformative learning.
Through our continued partnership, we are exploring other opportunities to build upon the curriculum and engage young people in agriculture through additional resources, tools, and programming. We hope to continue to share the curriculum materials by connecting with local and regional educators and agricultural experts. We remain interested in how youth learn to grow food for enjoyment, for sustenance, and for career-development. As such, we are also exploring what different models of agricultural learning look like and what we can learn from different models.
Access the Sowing Futures curriculum
The Sowing Futures curriculum is available for use under a Creative Commons License, CC BY-NC 4.0: Materials can be used and adapted for noncommercial purposes, with attribution.
How to cite: Bautista, J., Fentress, C., Fentress M., Bennett, H., and Herrenkohl, L. R. (2025). Sowing Futures Curriculum. myumi.ch/marsal-sowingfutures. CWO Farms, Detroit, MI and Eileen Lappin Weiser Center for the Learning Sciences, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan.
Project Participants
