At the local scale in Minneapolis/St. Paul (MSP), MN, urban farms, community gardens, and home gardens support diverse individual and community goals, including food access and sovereignty, recreation and outdoor activity, youth education, and racial, economic, and environmental justice. Collaborations between urban growers, policymakers, scholars, and communities that leverage urban farms and gardens as sites of ecological, social, and political transformation represent spaces of urban agroecology. Participatory research can play a vital role in urban agroecology by facilitating integration of science, movement, and practice, but frameworks to accomplish this are still emerging. This paper, therefore, proposes a "learning framework" for urban agroecology research that has emerged from our community-university partnership. We-a group of growers, community partners, and researchers-have worked with each other for 5 years through multiple projects that broadly focused on the socio-ecological drivers and impacts of urban farms and gardens in MSP. In fall 2019, we conducted our first formal evaluation of the participatory processes implemented in our current project with the objectives to (1) identify processes that facilitated or were barriers to authentic collaboration and (2) understand the role of relationships in the participatory processes. Qualitative surveys and interviews were developed and conducted with researchers, partners, and students. Analysis revealed that urban agroecology research provided a space for shared learning, which was facilitated through co-creation of research, embodied processes, and relationships with people, cohorts, and place. As part of our partnership agreements, we as researchers wrote this article-in close consultation with partners-to share this framework in the hopes that it will serve as a model for other research collaborations working within complex urban agroecological systems.

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IntroductionAgroecology has multiple beginnings in diverse knowledge systems, growing practices, and social movements which, as a whole, seek systemic transformation to build just food system futures. As graduate students, we have been inspired by agroecological movements and practitioners and endeavored to build our knowledge and capacities as agroecologists. Over the course of seven years, we have worked collectively with an evolving cohort to build relationships, understand critical lineages, and practice participatory processes that we found necessary for our development as agroecologists at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Building on this work, we sought to refine an emergent understanding of the necessary components of an agroecological pedagogy.MethodsWe thus hosted a series of workshops in summer 2019 to facilitate collective reflection and development of a pedagogy, which we further refined through collective autoethnography.ResultsThe resulting model contains five key components: a cohort at the heart of the model to facilitate collective learning; critical inquiry as the foundation of knowledge production; relational centering as the basis for building and maintaining care-based relationships with self and others; participatory practice as a space for taking action through and within relationships; and situated knowledge to recognize the unique and incomplete knowledge that each individual brings to their work.DiscussionWe imagine this model as the basis for a dedicated agroecology graduate program, and we close by sharing ongoing implementation efforts, key areas for further development, and our hopes for continued integration with broader movements. Ultimately, we have experienced this process as a transformational agroecological space and hope others are inspired to adapt, imagine, and enact the process, model, and principles in their own places and communities.

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