Abstract

Community Supported Agriculture is considered as a potential site for transformative adult learning. Over a three-year period, the author takes part in various informal activities with three CSA farms, observes the communication dynamic among members, and reflects on his own participation as a farm sharer. Sharers' perceptions of their experience, reasons for participation, and involvement are found to be highly heterogeneous and individualized, and forums for sharing perspectives are largely absent. This complicates an understanding of CSA solely in terms of current theories of transformative and social movement learning. Moreover, farm sharers' participation is characterized as a dialogue within a bioregional system that combines both conceptual and non-conceptual processes. The relation between these processes and the status ascribed to them is discussed. Implications for future research encourage a more critical and inclusive view of what educational research recognizes as learning and how it reproduces its own practice.