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Having a STEM literate society, capable of questioning and being caring and compassionate citizens of the world is vital in a global society. This project utilized place-based education (PBE) and experiential learning, via a campus or community farm, to provide college students with contextual learning experiences that enhanced content knowledge, course engagement, critical thinking skills, and civic mindedness. The research in this paper focuses on the outcomes of a second year ecological biology course, at an urban institution, that integrated an approximately six week lesson incorporating the college’s urban farm. When compared to a control group, derived of students from the previous year, students in the treatment group had greater attachment to the farm, greater knowledge around civic activities, and statistically significant increases in scientific literacy skills. 

Campus agriculture projects are increasingly being recognized as spaces impactful to student engagement and learning through curricular and co-curricular programming; however, most campus farm activities are limited to agriculture or sustainability programs and/or cocurricular student clubs. Thus, campus farms are largely underutilized in the undergraduate curriculum, marking a need to explore the efficacy and impact of engaging a diverse array of disciplinary courses in the rich social, environmental, and civic context of local sustainable agriculture. The Farm Hub program presented here incentivizes instructors to refocus a portion of existing course content around the topic of local, sustainable agriculture, and reduces barriers to using a campus farm as a situated learning context for curricula. A pedagogical framework founded in place-based experiential learning (PBEL) theory was developed to guide instructors in the development and implementation of 4–6-week inquiry-based PBEL modules embedded in existing courses. The framework was converted into a research protocol to quantify program implementation fidelity and PBEL best practice adherence for the proposed lesson plans (intended) and their implementation (applied). The framework enables the development of a cohesive cross-curricular program so that the impact of implementation fidelity and best practice adherence to student learning outcomes in scientific literacy, place attachment and meaning, and civic mindedness can be assessed and the results utilized to develop a formal farm-situated PBEL pedagogical taxonomy. This framework can be applied to PBEL curriculum in natural spaces beyond campus farms.