This paper describes the theoretical and conceptual framework and the research and practice model of Think&EatGreen@School, a community-based action research project aiming to foster food citizenship in the City of Vancouver and to develop a model of sustainable institutional food systems in public schools. The authors argue that educational and policy interventions at the school and school board level can drive the goals of food system sustainability, food security, and food sovereignty. The complex relationship between food systems, climate change and environmental degradation require that international initiatives promoting sustainability be vigorously complemented by local multi-stakeholder efforts to preserve or restore the capacity to produce food in a durable manner. As a step towards making the City of Vancouver green, we are currently involved in attempts to transform the food system of the local schools by mobilizing the energy of a transdisciplinary research team of twelve university researchers, over 300 undergraduate and graduate students, and twenty community-based researchers and organizations working on food, public health, environmental and sustainability education.
How do university students and instructors engage in discussions about race and racism in a country where speaking about race is perceived as racist? In Norway, as in much of Europe, the concept of 'race' is silenced, discarded as a wrong-headed remnant of Nazism, despite continued documentation of racial discrimination in labor, housing, education and interpersonal interaction. We used Membership Category Analysis to explore race-related interactions in classroom discourse in three university courses. We find that students and instructors implicitly equate Norwegianness with whiteness, peacefulness, and innocence, and characterize racism with deviance and non-Norwegianness. The national belonging of racialized 'Others' in Norway is ambiguous: accepted, but not unproblematically. The category race is elided with the concepts of culture, ethnicity and biology. We propose discursive meta-awareness as an educational approach to countering race evasiveness (formerly known as 'colorblindness').
Most educators perceive tension and conflict in teaching and learning situations Á so called 'hot moments' Á as a problem that must be solved in order to reestablish calm and order. However, we argue that the desire for control can reinforce the mechanisms that triggered the hot moment. Some classroom conflicts are not situational in a narrow sense, but are a result of power relations that are woven into academia and society at large. Understanding the classroom conflict only in terms of the immediate situation, and uncritically attempting to restore harmony, forecloses the opportunity to investigate and problematize these hierarchical power relations for the benefit of student learning. We use the concept of microaggression and two cases from our own teaching practice to highlight these kinds of informal power mechanisms.
Agenda 2030 and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have resulted in a heightened focus on sustainability in Norwegian – and global – academia. Sustainability Education requires innovative pedagogy and active, action-oriented learning allowing the learners to think critically and engage in exploring sustainable futures. Sustainability education is inherently interdisciplinary, requiring involvement from more than one academic discipline. However, university incentive structures create obstacles for "sharing" students and courses across units, and for innovating in teaching methods, especially in assessment. In order to coordinate, develop and collaborate on sustainability education at the University of Bergen, in 2020 we established a Sustainability Education Collective (Bærekraftskollegiet). Members are primarily academic staff from all six Faculties at the university, who either already teach courses related to sustainability or have a strong interest in building sustainability education into their discipline. In our first year's monthly meetings, we concentrated on defining the goals and guidelines of the collective, discussed thematic issues and held brainstorming and feedback sessions for sustainability initiatives, courses and study programs at the university. The Collective's structure has been loosely modelled on the Faculty Learning Community, a well-established and well-researched approach to engaging academic staff in ongoing activities around a common interest. The Sustainability Education Collective aims to be a transformative learning initiative with a multiplier effect, as courses and programs are developed and revised to foster sustainability learning for students.
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