The gardens as commons, the commons as classroom: Abolitionist civic learning in practice

This study examines how community gardening can function as an abolitionist civic learning space by shifting participants from service-based understandings of engagement toward collective responsibility and mutual care. Using narrative inquiry to examine the stories of nine undergraduate gardeners, I analyze how community gardening served as a lived commons where participants practiced mutual aid, decommodification, and shared governance. Findings show that the garden operated as a prefigurative space in which participants practiced alternative models of community life rooted in relational belonging rather than market or bureaucratic logics. Rather than learning about justice in abstract terms, participants experienced justice as a collective practice, developing an emergent civic identity grounded in solidarity and radical hope. This study contributes to scholarship on civic and community-based education by demonstrating how abolitionist pedagogy can unfold through embodied, land-based practices that cultivate democratic possibility outside traditional classrooms.