A dozen MIT college students just lately set out for Barcelona — not simply to check local weather resilience, however to expertise it firsthand. As a part of STS.S22 (How to Grow Resilient Futures: Regenerative Agriculture and Economies in Catalunya, Spain), an Independent Activities Period course taught by Kate Brown, the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History of Science, they stepped past the classroom and into dwelling techniques of sustainability.
Offered as a Global Classroom by way of MIT International Science and Technology (MISTI), the course reimagined what studying may appear like. Instead of working their method by way of a syllabus containing texts about sustainable farming and the facility of cooperatives, Brown’s college students bought their fingers soiled.
In truth, fairly actually: They visited native farms and slaughterhouses; prepped, cooked, and served a cooperative dinner to migrants; and constructed a working greenhouse. In the method, they constructed an enduring group and solid their very own visions about sustainability and the way they’re compelled to confront local weather change — as MIT college students now, and ultimately as alumni.
“I wanted the students to think about alternatives to the notion of capitalist development, where the latest technology is seen as the solution to every social problem that emerges. I wanted them to see ways people are solving problems in a place like Barcelona, where communities and ecologies are centered as part of the solution,” Brown says.
Through Brown’s partnerships on the Barcelona Urban Research Institute and Research and Degrowth (R&D) — and MISTI Spain’s infrastructure — the group of eight undergraduates and 4 graduate college students had the chance to look at the historic roots of cooperative actions in the area whereas concurrently experiencing as we speak’s iteration of co-op work.
Brown deliberately designed the three-week syllabus to push college students past the classroom partitions and get them face-to-face with native MISTI Spain collaborators from throughout the farming and ecology sectors. For instance, the category met with Pino Delàs, a pig farmer who left the economic system to start out his personal localized, cyclical operation, known as Llavora, which supported group farming and generated considerably much less waste.
Rooted in group
With greater than a century of making cooperatives — each staff and farms — Barcelona and its Catalan roots offered a great surroundings for the scholars to contemplate Brown’s questions by way of fieldwork rooted in group.
Within their first week on the bottom, they collaborated with volunteers on the Agora Squat. The small “pocket park” was initially slated to be developed right into a luxurious lodge, however a neighborhood group of 200 neighborhood residents got here collectively to protest the plan, as a substitute exercising their authorized proper to make use of the land, a caveat in Spanish regulation that permits neighbors to make a case for possessing land that isn’t getting used productively. Now, the plush inexperienced sq. boasts a group kitchen and gardens. One evening per week, volunteers present dinner for upward of 60 latest North African migrants, utilizing substances sourced from native fruiterias and outlets that will have in any other case gone to waste on the shut of enterprise.
On this explicit Thursday, Brown’s college students grew to become nonprofit managers and cooks, however additionally they grew to become group members themselves. In only a few hours from begin to end, the scholars needed to supply donated produce from the native distributors, provide you with a recipe utilizing what they’d gathered, after which put together a meal in the rudimentary kitchen. “They received a lot of turnips and had to create a recipe to use them,” Brown says. In the tip, a flavorful stew simmered in an enormous steel pan over propane burners, introduced alive with contemporary chilies picked from the backyard.
“This was way outside some students’ comfort zones,” Brown says. Yet, that was precisely the purpose of the exercise. By the tip of the night, the scholars found that typically probably the most profound instructional moments take form solely after difficult the bounds of studying.
“Many of us do not consider ourselves chefs, so it was empowering to discover that, together, we had the capacity to create a nourishing meal for 70 people, with produce that would have otherwise gone to waste. This meal that we created on the spot, in combination with many of the other workshops during the program, was a strong reminder of how much agency each of us has to effect change within isolating and constraining systems, especially in community with like-minded individuals,” says Sonia Torres Rodriguez, a first-year PhD pupil in city research and planning.
Torres Rodriguez focuses her doctoral analysis on reasonably priced and climate-resilient housing. She was drawn to the IAP program’s exploration of modern approaches to extra equitably distributing the means of manufacturing housing and meals, and was excited to be studying in particular person in Spain. “Cooking together, admiring healthy regenerative soil, foraging, learning traditional methods to braid grass, installing mini solar panels, and hosting poetry circles, would have been impossible to replicate on Zoom,” she says.
Calvin Macatantan, a senior in laptop science and concrete research and planning, was initially drawn to this system due to his curiosity in resilient economies and the way they assist the communities they serve. Other than visiting household in the Philippines, he’d by no means left the United States earlier than. He was particularly moved by the group’s keep at La Bruguera, an eco-resort partnered with R&D that serves as a “living laboratory.” The cohort heard from native specialists in regenerative agriculture, soil well being, and low-tech agroforestry, alongside hands-on actions resembling eco-art periods, weaving classes, and the rebuilding of a greenhouse.
As a part of a last undertaking for the course, Macatantan and one other pupil wrote and illustrated a kids’s guide that explains La Bruguera’s work by making the soil come to life as the primary protagonist for younger readers.
Brown’s course pushed Sofia Espindola de La Mora to suppose extra critically about on a regular basis techniques and their environmental affect. Originally from Puerto Rico, the first-year pupil has watched helplessly in latest years as local weather change has elevated the frequency and magnitude of pure disasters at residence.
She got here to MIT in search of solutions and eager to make a distinction, and signed up for Brown’s course as a part of that quest. “It was fascinating to see firsthand that the degrowth movement doesn’t mean slowing down is a bad thing, but instead that the constant striving for more is what has led us to many of the predicaments we now face as a society. It forced me to think about whether it would even be possible for me to sustain the life I have now using renewable energy,” Espindola de La Mora says. The course satisfied her to focus her research on local weather system science and engineering.
A local weather context
Broadening college students’ views was a precedence for Brown, whose analysis lies on the intersection of historical past, science, expertise, and bio-politics. She’s recognized on campus for programs like STS.038 (Risky Business: Food Production, Environment, and Health). Her 2026 book, “Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present and Future of the Self-Provisioning City,” examines city techniques, together with gardens.
When Brown was designing the Global Classroom — made doable by way of MISTI, with further assist from the MIT Energy Initiative — she centered a price she considers crucial in any course as we speak: addressing local weather and different human-driven environmental challenges.
“I’m focused on training students to approach these problems at the local level, so they see what happens when they’re working through communities, rather than prescribing to them something to scale all over the world,” Brown says.
That localized, individualized method helped broaden on what the scholars initially believed was doable, and compelled them to change into a part of the answer by way of their research and in their skilled lives.
Since their return to campus, Brown’s college students have continued to lean on each other and construct group, one meal at a time. Many Tuesday nights, they arrive collectively to prepare dinner dinner, Barcelona squat model. Each particular person brings their substances, and collectively they create a recipe that nourishes and sustains.
“I was losing a lot of faith in the world before this trip,” Macatantan admits. “We’re constantly surrounded by consumption and the drive to do more. This experience helped me realize that I want to do something that impacts people. For me, that will look like research. I want to become an expert in a subject and become someone who can help communicate that knowledge to people who need it.”
“MISTI Global Classrooms like this show what happens when learning extends beyond the MIT campus,” says Alicia Goldstein Raun, affiliate director of MISTI and managing director of the MIT-Spain Program on the Center for International Studies. “I was excited when Professor Brown approached me to help shape this new class, knowing it would resonate with students,” says Raun. “The students tackled global challenges like climate change and explored the degrowth movement while immersing themselves in Spanish communities and culture.”
For college in designing a MISTI Global Classroom, extra data will be discovered here.