Experiential learning and the visceral practice of 'healthy eating' (original) (raw)
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AARE 2010 INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION …, 2010
In this study we interrogate the ways nutrition and health have become increasingly influential to children’s everyday life practices and conceptualisations of food. We challenge the orthodoxy of meanings afforded to food that draw a distinct binary between ‘good’/‘bad’ or ‘healthy’/‘unhealthy’; ideas widely promulgated in health texts, popular culture and pedagogical practice. Whilst these dominant medico-scientific discourses are pervasive in accounts of food, they are not the only meanings that permeate the popular cultural and pedagogical landscape; for instance, there has been a burgeoning interest in culinary cooking programmes and food sustainability in recent years. In this study, we use Foucault’s notion of biopower to trace the various ways food is governed through interventions; pedagogised by popular culture; and, taken up in school policies and practices. We draw on interviews with 32 Year five students from Australian public and private primary schools. Not surprisingly, the analysis demonstrates how students reiterated food as a practice of ‘temptation’ and ‘risk’, similar to nutrition-based knowledge of food circulated in popular culture and health programmes. This suggests that other meanings of food are often socially and pedagogically marginalised. We argue that because of the perceived risk attached to food practices, these young people see food as an object of guilt and a reason for self-surveillance. After discussing the results we consider some of the consequences for young peoples’ sense of self and their relationships with food in every day life, particularly in light of the perilous effects of deeming food as ‘good’/‘bad’ from such a young age. As a point of departure we explore some of the subjugated knowledges that can be brought to the table of food pedagogies in schools in order to bring about a broader assemblage of food ‘truths’.
Enriching Tacit Food Knowledges: Towards an embodied food policy
In my home city of Bristol, UK, there is an exciting initiative called the Bristol Food Policy Council (BFPC) that started in 2011. BFPC activity has involved the publication of a fascinating report titled 'Who feeds Bristol?' (Carey, 2011), requests for members of the Bristol community to sign-up to support the 'Good Food' charter (bristolgoodfood.org 2012) and championing local food initiatives. Mike Carolan no doubt would applaud these initiatives but I think these are not what would form an embodied food policy based on his embodied food politics. In his book Embodied Food Politics Carolan gives many examples of how community engagements can foster how people can
Examining Children Food Heritage as a Process of Learning to Become “Eaters-in-Context”.
In this paper we argue for the use of the word ‘heritage’ when referring to children construction and transmission of their identity in relation to food (Hubert, 1994). We show that children construction of a food heritage is quite different from that of the adult world and it is characterized by the relationships and practices they develop with other peers in highly social contexts around food. We offer the concept of “eater-in-context” as a mechanism for examining how such process takes place. To do that, we begin by unpacking three dimensions of ‘food heritage’, namely place, agents, and time involved in it, and propose to view those dimensions within school foodscapes (Mikkelsen, 2011; Johansson et al, 2009) to relate the material and immaterial aspects of children food heritage. Through two vignettes we ground our conceptual proposal, and discuss comparatively the theoretical and practical issues emerging out of such grounding and the relevance to the increasing concern with children eating practices in and out of schools.
2012
In the past five years, the Food for Life Partnership (FFLP) has been working in schools across England to transform food culture. A significant element of the FFLP's work has been setting up school gardens and embedding food-growing activities in class to meet curriculum targets. Until now, the positive impact of food growing on learning and participation has only been seen through observation and anecdote. This report highlights important evidence about the diverse range of benefits that food growing in schools offers and the worthwhile role growing activities play in a child's educational experience.
Food Education in schools: why do some headteachers make this a priority?
This thesis concerns the reasons why some primary school headteachers in England include Food Education so prominently in their school’s pedagogical curriculum. School leaders are seen as the ‘architects’ of transforming the food culture within a school setting. The current inclusion of Food Education in the English National Curriculum focuses on teaching children about how food choices can have a positive impact on their own physical health and well-being. My study investigates if there are other reasons why a set of recognised leaders in Food Education include this learning focus in their school’s curriculum despite the fact that this is not an area for which they are held accountable. This qualitative research study is based on semi-structured interviews with ten primary school headteachers in England. The responses from the face-to-face semi-structured interviews with the headteachers are submitted to Reflective Thematic Analysis which leads to two contributions to the literatur...
Children's understanding of food and meals in the foodscape at school
International Journal of Consumer Studies, 2011
Children come into contact with food in different places and contexts, i.e. 'foodscapes'. The aim of the paper was to study what knowledge children construct regarding food and meals in the foodscape at school and how they do so, focusing on the school meal context. Observations, interviews and focus group interviews were used. The children appropriated ideas and understandings from the adult world and society as a whole and used it among their peers in the school meal situation. This included the adoption of institutional commensality, the telling of stories about food, and the classification of foods in dichotomies.
Editorial Introduction: Children's Food Practices and School Meals
Contemporary research on children's food practices has brought to the fore children's voice and agency, in an effort to recognize that children's intersubjectivities affect and are affected by their own bodies, their families, their peers, teachers and food-serving staff, schools, markets, the media, publicity, food policies and, ultimately, the whole food provisioning system. Albeit this body of work has offered major contributions to understanding children's agential and powerful capacities in negotiating their food preferences with others, recent calls draw attention to start moving beyond voice and agency in order to fully account children (and people more generally) as 'embodied beings in the world' with feelings, emotions and senses (Kraftl, 2013; Martens et al., 2013, p. 1). However, these are not calls for dismissing voice and agency as unimportant, these are instead invitations to give more attention in childhood studies to embodied practice, affective experience and emotions (see Blazek and Windram-Geddes, 2013). Children's food practices and school meals are excellent research sites where such invitations can be enacted.