Doris Wagner spends a lot of time thinking about the best approach to creating a healthy, resilient planet. Maybe it’s regenerative agriculture, which involves crop rotation, cover crops, no tilling, and is known to improve soil health and crop yields. Then again, maybe organic farming, with no synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, is the way to go. But regenerative agriculture is not always organic and neither, says Wagner, DiMaura Professor of Biology, is likely to meet the world’s food needs.
Perhaps we should turn to CRISPR technology, which rapidly accomplishes what would previously take generations of selective breeding—a technology already having real-world impacts, says Wagner, pointing to Kenyan farmers who used it to develop parasite-resistant sorghum. But hold on: This technology doesn’t square with organic agriculture, so maybe the way forward is regenerative ag plus more vigorous and nutritious crops?
It is exactly these tensions that Wagner had in mind when she developed Hands on Plants, a new undergraduate course that’s part of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Paideia Program. The class, which involves numerous guest speakers and trips to farms and gardens in the Philadelphia region, is running for the first time this semester. It was co-developed with Ben Joseph Stahl and Sayli Limaye, students in Penn’s landscape architecture master’s program, as well as Zida Anyachebelu, C’25.
Wagner has never taught a Paideia course before but was drawn to the program because of its emphasis on dialogue. “People might have different takes on what a solution would look like, and Paideia encourages being comfortable with that dialogue and being constructive,” says Wagner, whose Plant Adaptability and Resilience Center (known as Plant ARC) launched in 2024. “I wanted to lead a course that was aligned with this outlook, and I felt there was student interest in working toward solutions rather than being stuck in doomsday thinking.”
It can be really hard to truly comprehend someone else’s point of view. It’s about creating space and being willing to talk and listen. There will still be tensions, and we will find a way to deal with them.
Class field trips to sites including Penn Farm and the Philadelphia Orchard Project show students how practitioners weigh the needs of the land and community. Stahl, who serves as a TA for the class, says growers and practitioners across the region have welcomed interaction with students, a group that includes math major Hannah MacDonald, C’26.
In the summer of 2024, MacDonald had a fellowship at Penn Farm, where she and other students spent eight-hour shifts working in fields, ultimately harvesting thousands of pounds of food to donate to food access points on and off campus. “I love to be outside and get my hands dirty,” she says. “But this work is also part of the movement toward food justice.”
Hands on Plants was a way for MacDonald to nurture this interest. She says the mix of activities—short lectures, site visits, and lab work—make the class unique and valuable. “I can really engage with presenters and my classmates. We even went to Dr. Wagner’s lab and got to work on plant transformation, which was so cool,” she says. MacDonald also volunteers with one of the organizations the class visited, the Philadelphia Orchard Project, which works with communities to fill urban spaces such as gardens and formerly vacant lots with useful and edible plants.
Community involvement is key, says Wagner, pointing to another tension the course explores. “Active gardens and green spaces provide fresh, locally grown vegetables and Penn’s own Urban Health Lab has shown benefits like a reduction in gun violence and stress-related health issues” in places where the greening has occurred, she explains. “So, what’s the tension? Look at Norris Square in Philadelphia. The community has worked hard to build gardens that celebrate local culture over the last decades. And now one result of the greening is that same community is being priced out of their homes.”
The class touches on other issues—imposing the cost of tree maintenance on under-resourced communities, for example, or determining which trees are best suited to certain areas. “There is a big native plant movement,” Stahl says. “But with the changing climate and natural disasters, should we bring plants native to the south up north, where it is warming? Are there plants better adapted to cities?”
While the course demonstrates the possibilities of working across disciplines and perspectives on these tricky issues, it cannot resolve all tensions—and Wagner says that’s ok. “The Paideia program has an outlook that it can be really hard to truly comprehend someone else’s point of view,” she says. “It’s about creating space and being willing to talk and listen. There will still be tensions, and we will find a way to deal with them.”