Planting Stories: Seeds of Diaspora

Migration often disrupts the continuity of cultural traditions, separating people from the land that sustained their ancestors. As younger generations lose touch with the traditional uses of plants, a vital part of their cultural heritage risks disappearing.

To help bridge this generational divide, Columbia World Projects supported an interdisciplinary team of faculty to develop a curriculum aimed at empowering high school students in New York City to recover lost narratives and reconnect with their cultural traditions.

Rooting Education in Experience

Through an innovative partnership between Columbia University, the Columbia Secondary School, and the New York Botanical Garden, the Planting Stories: Seeds of Diaspora project transformed the streets of New York City into an open-air classroom.

The team demonstrated how interdisciplinary education, rooted in place and culture, can help students build writing, science, and cultural literacy skills, while strengthening connections to their families and communities.

The 16-module curriculum, which integrates oral history, foraging walks, and creative writing, was piloted and refined over the course of two years. In addition, the project fostered reciprocal learning between high schoolers enrolled in the course and Columbia graduate students, who gained valuable experience providing community-based instruction.

Project Leads

Anelise Chen
Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, Columbia University School of the Arts
Anelise Chen is the author of the experimental novel, So Many Olympic Exertions (Kaya Press 2017), a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She is a 5 under 35 Honoree from the National Book Foundation.

Ana Paulina Lee
Former Associate Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University
Ana Paulina Lee is an Associate Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. Lee's research and teaching interests focus on race, gender, nation, and citizenship; slavery and abolition, postcolonial studies; subaltern studies; literary theory; visual culture and performance, and cultural studies with a focus on 19th and 20th century Brazil and Ibero Pacific and Indian Ocean histories.

Lynnette Widder
Professor of Practice, Columbia University School of Professional Studies
Lynnette Widder was educated as both architect and architectural historian. Raised and schooled in New York City, she has practiced architecture in New York, Berlin, Basel, and Zurich; and has taught at universities in the US, Canada, and Switzerland.

Project Team

• Tao Leigh Goffe, Cornell University
• Shauna Downs, Rutgers University
• Darby Smith, Columbia University