The first day of fall semester, Megan Mucioki shared a pawpaw with the dozen Emory College students in her Food and Forest course. Few of the once-thriving trees in the region still yield fruit, due to the loss of careful cultivation.
The custard-like fruit — which the assistant professor of environmental sciences describes as a creamy mix of pineapple and banana — was the first tasty lesson in grasping the fact that metro Atlanta’s forests were one-time farms for Indigenous communities. Mucioki hopes that understanding can shape current forest stewardship and rebuild relationships broken by history.
“The first thing to move away from is the idea that wild food is dangerous,” Mucioki says. “Indigenous communities have eaten these for thousands of years. The more people have to learn about and engage with that landscape, the more they will be comfortable with the forest being part of their food system.”
Experiential learning opens a window to the past
The Muscogee people planted and tended to the chestnut, hickory, pawpaw, persimmon red oak and sassafras trees that blanket the Weelaunee Forest. The 3,500 acres of mature woodland, also known as the South River Forest, is a key reason one of Atlanta’s nicknames is “The City in a Forest.”
The Food and Forest course led by Megan Mucioki included lessons that united botany, environmental stewardship, Indigenous studies and food sovereignty.
“It was eye-opening for me to realize there is food everywhere because there is always evidence of an Indigenous presence on the land,” says Ashen Freeman, a senior psychology major and environmental science minor who grew up learning Navajo practices in his native New Mexico.
“I even saw it on land that had been cleared for farming, with the oak stands and huge pecan tree,” Freeman adds. “The land remembered, even if the people didn’t.”
An interdisciplinary researcher, Mucioki works closely with community and tribal groups. Her class collaborated with Malinda Maynor Lowery’s class, Concepts in Indigenous Sovereignties, which is co-taught with professor Matthew Yates from the College of Muscogee Nation (CMN) in Oklahoma. Students had the opportunity to meet several times throughout the semester.
“Experiential learning is such a profound aspect of teaching at College of Muscogee Nation, and class is an important opportunity to teach the cultural knowledge that maintained the land to feed a population,” says Lowery, the Cahoon Family Professor of American History who is also program leader for the Emory Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies.
“The hard work it takes to maintain a food system is the hard work the Muscogee are still doing, hundreds of miles from their homelands,” adds Lowery. “This is not in the past. This is knowledge for now.”
Emory students experienced the contemporary context firsthand in early September, when they joined CMN students for a nature walk during the Ocmulgee Indigenous Celebration in Macon. Told only to keep track of the number and species of plants they spotted, everyone began to share their knowledge and experience of different plants.
Muscogee students were familiar with several plants on the walk and also encountered some native plants for the first time.
“We haven’t had access to that biodiversity for a couple of centuries,” says Rev. Chebon Kernell, Emory’s Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Indigenous Knowledge, who attended later forest visits with students.
“We are just now coming back to understanding why life thrived in our homeland the way it did,” he adds. “We are just beginning to try to conceptualize what the future holds and how we can build a more sustainable and responsible future, together.”
The fruit of new perspectives
The course meets twice weekly, with one session in the classroom and the other spent exploring metro Atlanta forests. Experienced food foragers are among the community members Mucioli invites to the weekly excursions.
Robby Astrove led multiple trips through his role as preserve manager at Arabia Mountain Nature Preserve. He also led one class walk through East Atlanta, where he had worked with community groups to plant fruit trees.
On his last guided trip with the class in November, Astrove helped students plant serviceberry trees at a trailhead near Arabia Mountain. Rich in antioxidants and native to the region, the blueberry-like fruit is sweet enough to eat right off the tree.
“I happened to see some of them a week after our walk, and they must have taken what I said to heart because all of them were foraging and picking fruit,” Astrove says. “The students are all brilliant and passionate, which is really the dream.”
Scarlett Whitney may have been one of the students that Astrove spotted. A senior double major in environmental science and business, Whitney has a new “party trick” with friends. She walks around looking for nut or fruit trees, and then she looks down.
That’s how she has found persimmons (in Baker Woodlands behind the Carlos Museum and on the Atlanta BeltLine), pecans (from a giant tree she walked under on the Quad for years) and fragrant sweet olive flowers from two trees by Goizueta Business School.
Beyond being fun, the new skills will be useful when Whitney starts her job doing sustainability consulting for Deloitte after graduation.
“I can see how, if I’m working on a project about carbon offsets, to recommend a project to plant more fruit trees,” Whitney says. “It was extremely intentional how the forests were planted, and it’s a mindset we really should get back to.”
“I can’t go a day without mentioning something from this class,” she adds. “It has changed my perspective on the way I think about Atlanta and Georgia and the forest in general.”
Environmental sciences professor Megan Mucioki discusses how she and students learned from each other during the Food and Forest class. Video by Avery D. Spalding, Emory Photo/Video.
LINC courses unite disciplines and students
Courses like these led by Mucioki and Lowery are part of a unique initiative that allows Emory College undergraduate students to dive deep into interdisciplinary learning.
Emory’s Institute for the Liberal Arts (ILA) launched the Learning through Inclusive Collaboration (LINC) program in 2019, pairing faculty from different departments who collaborate to create connections between their existing courses.
LINC’s goal is to help students develop new insights by exploring and discussing overlapping themes and perspectives across disciplines.
“Students in both courses are thinking through complex theories, histories and scientific research,” says Rose Deighton-Mohammed, an assistant teaching professor in the ILA and former director of the LINC program. “Then, they’re coming together to look at how that applies in specific instances.”
This fall, Emory College offered five LINC courses, including pairings between biology and ecology, psychology and linguistics, and English and Africana methods.
By allowing students who typically may not have class together the chance to learn in a collaborative setting, LINC courses encourage students to take on a teaching role and strengthen their understanding of various subjects, Deighton-Mohammed says.
“As the student, you become responsible for teaching students in the other course what you're learning about, and that deepens what you know about the course content,” she says.
“If you can communicate an idea to someone else, answer their questions and take into account what's confusing for them, you gain a deeper understanding yourself.”
Liberal arts intersections
LINC arose from an Academic Learning Community, an informal seminar intended to engage Emory’s faculty in innovative research and discussion. Its implementation was spearheaded by Kim Loudermilk, Robyn Fivush and David Lynn.
“The LINC program started when we got a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to think about ways to better integrate the sciences and humanities,” Loudermilk says. “We began by bringing together a group of faculty from across the college to talk about what we might do to achieve this goal.”
LINC courses are available to all Emory students. To date, more than 1,300 Emory students have participated in the program.
Emory biologist Arri Eisen took over as program director this fall, having previously taught a LINC course alongside Emory historian Tom Rogers.
Together, the professors bridged their expertise in the history of hunger and epigenetics as well as human disease to identify patterns in their work.
“In our meetings, we did story circles where students were in mixed history and biology groups. They told a story about an event around food that changed their life, or explored fad diets from biologic and historic perspectives or shared final research projects with each other,” Eisen says.
The experience resonated so much that the professors are now working on a book project together.
The book is just one example of how generative the LINC program has been to faculty and students alike, Deighton-Mohammed says.
“We definitely want to help people break through those molds of thinking about themselves as belonging to only one discipline or one division,” Deighton-Mohammed says. “Curricular structures and people’s goals can sometimes reinforce silos, but we also think a lot of people are craving these kinds of multimodal, experiential and interdisciplinary learning opportunities.”
Students planted serviceberry trees at Arabia Mountain Nature Preserve. Photos by Sarah Woods, Emory Photo/Video.
Students planted serviceberry trees at Arabia Mountain Nature Preserve. Photos by Sarah Woods, Emory Photo/Video.
Students planted serviceberry trees at Arabia Mountain Nature Preserve. Photos by Sarah Woods, Emory Photo/Video.
Students planted serviceberry trees at Arabia Mountain Nature Preserve. Photos by Sarah Woods, Emory Photo/Video.