in the project could be self‐interpreted as “failure” and ultimately lead to a decrease in the perception of their agency (referred to by Bilon 2021, p. 173 as the “non‐learning of agency”). As activist learning inevitably carries a risk of failure (Ludlow 2010), support for students in understanding the risks of failure, and managing the impacts of perceived failure are a potential area for staff involved in activist learning projects, to explore.
2.3.3 Students' Transience
University students are inherently transient members of the university community, both through the year (marked by holiday periods and uneven academic workloads) and due to the time‐limited nature of their studies (typically three years for non‐vocational, undergraduate courses in the UK). In the SSH project, annual turnover of housemates was enforced to allow a new cohort of students each year to live in the SSH. However, many students were informally associated with the project before becoming a resident and stayed involved in the project in some way after they had moved.
Students' transience can pose several challenges for activism projects (Laycock Pedersen et al. 2019). Ensuring ongoing maintenance and continuity can be logistically challenging (especially for the garden) and requires students to plan for maintenance during their absences. Furthermore, maintenance of such a project is so demanding that it can limit the types and amounts of new projects students can take on. One interviewee (Year 2) expressed disappointment with what was achieved in their year, feeling that in that year they had “only continued” rather than added to the project. Creativity and agency are important aspects of both learning and motivation and therefore opportunities for students to exercise these through new project developments are not only desirable (Briggs et al. 2019), but necessary for the project to contribute to activist learning. As such, there is a tension between the need to support students with new projects and encourage students to maintain and continue with existing projects.
A chronic issue within transient projects is knowledge handover (Laycock Pedersen 2019). This issue is particularly acute for the SSH because of students' relatively limited food growing competencies. To mitigate the lack of a handover, students were encouraged to produce a report or other artifact to pass on their project learning (including such prosaic information as crop rotations used) to the following year's students. This was carried out partially and reluctantly and, likely as such activities felt like “work,” competed with formal curriculum deadlines and/or there were no consequences for outgoing residents if this information was not completed. Knowledge was likely more effectively transferred where more informal student involvements overlapped between years. Subsequent housemates living in the SSH in 2019–2020 and 2020–2021 set up and developed a shared drive with resources, photos, and guides which help address the knowledge transfer issue.
At the start of each year, the new housemates demonstrated limited understanding about the complexity of driving real change. For example, their insight was limited regarding the need for involvement and negotiations with diverse stakeholders. In particular, there was a lack of understanding about the importance of negotiating with the university in order to carry out activities (such as digging, hedge trimming) in the SSH grounds. Many change projects require development of relationships and trust between diverse stakeholders over long‐term periods beyond the timescale of any one student's time at university (Brinkman and Hirsch 2019). This means that if university staff have negative experiences of one group of housemates, it can tarnish the relationship with the next. As a result, long‐term stakeholders need to understand that each set of students comes fresh to the project, without the learning and experience acquired by previous students. There also needs to be an understanding that the SSH is intended to be fundamentally pedagogical in nature, and therefore the tangible outcomes of student projects may vary in quality and impact. As such, it is important that there are permanent members of staff who understand the pedagogical nature of the project to support and mediate good quality student–university relationships.
2.3.4 Time Management and Competing Priorities
Time management was a key issue for students living in the SSH, whether juggling competing demands between academic studies, personal issues and the SSH project, or competing demands of a myriad sustainability‐related projects. Time pressures were articulated as being particularly severe when SSH residents were in the final year of their degrees.
The initial year of the project involved greater set‐up time than in later years. As a result, one interviewee acknowledged that his academic work was negatively affected by his participation. However, he saw that learning through the project could compensate for any negative educational impacts:
Provided the [garden foundations] were in, I knew future years would have an easier time. They'd still struggle but they'd have an easier time. But you know, that's part of the learning curve, understanding how you have to integrate sustainability with everything else you are doing, even as students. So I think if it does affect people's grades in the future I think it compensates for the skills it gives. The only problem is there's no quantification for those skills that are learnt in a project like this other than references or fitting it in somewhere and talking about the key skills you have developed, but there's no qualification for it.
(Student 2, Year 1 of project)
This student acknowledged that the learning that took place was informal, unquantified, and potentially unrecognized. Because there is no formal recognition of this learning, students must rely on their ability to articulate it, first to themselves, and then to others.
It is notable that this student, who appeared willing to sacrifice individual academic achievement for the project, expressed his goals for the project through language clearly aligned with activism. He highlighted students' rights to grow food, and the desire to drive long‐lasting change through a project with temporal continuity.
As this project sits purely within the informal curriculum with no real accountability other than to each other for project achievements, it is unsurprising that for many students the SSH took a backseat to other commitments. For many, trying to find a workable balance between the project's goals, their academic studies, and normal student social life seemed elusive.
Although burnout was not mentioned by any students interviewed, the subtext of the interview with Student 3 (Year 2) hinted at symptoms of burnout. We have also observed burnout in students involved in this and other sustainability activist projects in later years, including seeing the negative implications to their academic studies. In the context of activism, burnout can be described as “the end result of a process in which idealistic and highly committed people lose their spirit” (Pines 1994, p. 381). Many studies of youth activism have highlighted the dangers of burnout (e.g. Gagnon 2020). In addition to their activism, student activists are faced with academic pressures, leading to risk of more immediate and intense burnout (Gagnon 2020). Although acknowledging the learning and growth that can occur as a result of engaging in activism, activism takes students’ time and energy away from activities that lead to educational benefits and college experiences (Linder et al. 2019) and can result in negative physical, emotional, and mental health consequences (Vaccaro and Mena 2011). Burnout in young activists can mean that, without finding the right support systems, they might fail to meet their potential (Gagnon 2020). Furthermore, activist burnout can lead to the destabilization of activist movements (Gorski and Chen 2015). Although we believe that activist learning is a good thing, without proper support and care it can come with problems, which may be exacerbated by the combination of: deeply rooted passion and motivation; lack of formal structure, support, and accountability; diverse motivations and expectations; and diverse and competing time pressures. Academics supporting student activism need to consider effective mechanisms to support student activists through both the formal and non‐formal/informal curriculum.
We have explored some of the challenges of the SSH project and student activism in general, set against some of the learning such projects enable. In Section 2.4, we will explore the implicit and articulated learning and development of students from participation in the SSH project.