Pedagogies That Explore Food Practices: Resetting the Table for Improved Eco-Justice

Abstract

As health threats appear with increasing regularity in our food systems and other food crises loom worldwide, we look to rural areas to provide local and nutritious foods. Educationally, we seek approaches to food studies that engage students and their communities and, ultimately, lead to positive action. Yet food studies receive only generic coverage and tangential attention within existing curricula. This article, reporting a pilot study located at Canada's geographic and cultural edge, focuses on local knowledge about past and present food practices. Objectives are to test pedagogies that bring all students greater opportunities for engagement and learning about their physical environment and food history, and that can be applied to rural and, with modifications, urban settings. Three critical, place-base pedagogical approaches — experiential, discovery and arts-based — to classroom teaching and learning are discussed, as well as implications for educational leadership, teacher training and curriculum development.

Development of School Food Education: Teachers’ Teaching Interventions in Urban Middle Schools of Northern Taiwan

“…Moreover, the correlation between community awareness and cohesion commitment is the highest, representing the importance of the relationship school food education development. The reason for this importance is that in teaching, teachers can strengthen community links with other teachers, thereby expanding teacher peer learning (Harris & Barter, 2015) and contributing to the construction of a school culture for the development of food education. However, this relationship has no predictive power for teaching commitments.…”

“…All these types of knowledge have a function in research on teaching, so academic research knowledge emphasizes critical reflection (Bucher, 2017) and scientific thinking (Galt et al, 2013). Teachers’ interactive network exploration and action research are particularly important methods for developing knowledge (Harris & Barter, 2015).…”

Hegemony, Counter-Hegemony and Food Systems Literacy: Transforming the Global Industrial Food System

“…From questions such as patterns of land ownership, the control of seeds, and the ecological impacts of large-scale industrialised and chemical-dependent monocultures to the saturation of low-income neighbourhoods with fast food restaurants, the food system ripples with political tensions and power asymmetries (Howard, 2016). Yet, as with traditional environmental education curricula, these uncomfortable matters are for the most part avoided in the conventional health-focused teaching of food in schools (Harris & Barter, 2015).…”

“…Place-based and critical food pedagogies seek to address many of these failings (Crosley, 2013;Harris & Barter, 2015), and it is clear that food movements can have a direct and positive role to play in this emerging arena of dialectical interactions between the classroom and the space of social activism. For example, food justice movements are deeply rooted in grounded explorations of place and provide learning experiences that largely take place outside of the classroom in settings such as community gardens (Crosley, 2013;Swan & Flowers, 2015).…”

“…Our particular contribution is to outline an explicit political economy of the food system accompanied by a theory of transformative change, to complement recent investigations and discussions highlighting the need for and potential of critical food pedagogies as an especially relevant, practical and powerful arena for environmental education (Crosley, 2013;Harris & Barter, 2015;Swan & Flowers, 2015). In this, we identify with and share Henry Giroux's (2010) conceptualisation of the role of critical pedagogy as being to:…”