Teaching the Social Issues of a Sustainable Food Supply (original) (raw)
Related papers
Teaching for Sustainability in a Social Studies Methods Course: Opportunities and Challenges
2015
The teaching of environmental sustainability was explored in five sections of an elementary social studies methods course with pre-service teachers. Using surveys and structured discussions, we identified pre-service teachers' beliefs about environmental sustainability in response to prior experiences, course readings, films, guest lecture, and group activities (e.g., simulations). Findings suggest the subjects' knowledge of environmental sustainability increased as a result of the course. They believed environmental sustainability is a significant global issue meriting attention in the elementary classroom; however, they felt ill prepared to teach sustainability issues to young children in developmentally appropriate ways. Finally, pre- service teachers expressed caring about improving their own consumer behaviors and sought concrete solutions from others in order to do so. Implications for elementary social studies education are discussed. Keywords: elementary social studi...
Sustainable food choices? A study of students’ actions in a home and consumer studies classroom
Environmental Education Research
Home and Consumer Studies (HCS) is a subject in the Swedish compulsory school that has sustainability issues clearly enrolled in its syllabus. Among other things, students should learn to make sustainable food choices, i.e.they should understand the consequences concerning health, finance and environment of what food they choose to consume. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the discussion about education for sustainable development (ESD) by investigating how students act in different decision-making processes during foodwork in HCS. Subsequently challenges when teaching sustainable food consumption are highlighted. The empirical material consists of video-recorded students (year 9) foodworking in an HCS classroom. Based on John Dewe ys philosophy, Practical Epistemological Analysis (PEA) is used to analyse how the students make choices and proceed in their work. The taste of food is decisive for how the students move on in their foodwork. Sustainability aspects are raised to some extent but do not have the same significance. It is concluded that it is complex to teach sustainable food consumption and possibilities to modify the teaching so that taste become part of the content when teaching sustainable food consumption is discussed.
An emerging signature pedagogy for sustainable food systems education
Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, 2017
Concerns are growing over the ability of the modern food system to simultaneously achieve food security and environmental sustainability in the face of global change. Yet, the dominant tendency within university settings to conceptualize and address diverse food system challenges as separate, disconnected issues is a key barrier to food system transformation. To address this fragmented approach, educators in North American institutes of higher education have begun new degree programs, specializations and certificates related to food systems. These programs, which we term sustainable food system education (SFSE) programs, have a common goal: to support post-secondary students across a range of disciplines in developing the knowledge, skills and dispositions to effectively address complex challenges in the food system. Graduates of these programs will be able to engage in collective action towards transforming the food system. As educators participating in flagship SFSE programs, we i...
Food for Thought: Developing Curricula for Sustainable Food Systems Education Programs
Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, 2014
The study of food systems is a quickly growing field. In high demand by postsecondary students, new food systems studies programs are emerging from a range of disciplines. Food systems are inherently complex and are best understood from a range of academic perspectives and practical contexts. We review current scholarship on food systems pedagogy and present approaches for developing and implementing food systems curricula. A literature review and our experience indicate that effective food systems program approaches include emphasizing interdisciplinarity and a systems approach and balancing experience, theory, and practical skills acquisition. We discuss strategies, challenges and opportunities for building food systems curricula.
Critical Food Pedagogy and Sustainable Development
Encyclopedia of Sustainability in Higher Education, 2019
The term "greening" may have a direct meaning. A viable definition might refer to the action and result of its effects, over plants, fields, meadows or when pastures that were dry turn green in color (Definicióna 2018). This intervention might be expanded to cover campus greening at the universities. For instance, Jiménez Martínez (2017) indicates that it may encompass ideas or concepts or activities such as: (a) Recording of ecological practices carried out in daily university operations (energy consumption decrease, reuse of water, waste classification, etc.), which are regarded as efforts to institutionalize sustainability through the implementation of new relationships among the university community and its environment (b) The consideration of practices and perceptions of students and professors regarding sustainability (c) Incorporating sustainability as an academic discipline and as a study program of higher education Perceptions of Sustainability and Greening and the Difficulties that Arise Incorporating sustainability in universities continues to be a challenge. Ensuring its adoption and diverse paths to achieve it has not been easy. It also allows us to recognize that sustainability requires mandatory elements such as professional development of university teachers as well as university self-transformation and capacity
Changing from current unsustainable production, consumption, and disposal patterns will clearly require technological, political and other structural changes, but also individual behavior change. Consumer demand and individuals' purchasing power exerts pressure on many parts of the production system, including how crops are produced (e.g., organic), products are packaged and labeled (e.g., rBGH-free labels on milk), and even where products are distributed and how they are disposed of. Individual consumer behaviors have even led to political and structural changes over time, such as the consumer boycott of tuna which led to 1990 US legislation creating the “Dolphin Safe” tuna label. One of the central ways to foster responsible citizenry and promote sustainable production is to harness the capacity of teachers and schools to create change. Educating for conscious consumerism is a critical part of creating changes in production, consumption and disposal systems, but our current education system and approaches often reinforce unsustainable practices that neglect subjective ways of knowing as well as action and change. Research and experience suggests that traditional, information intensive teaching about sustainability alone does not motivate the behavior change a transition to sustainability will require. Utilizing a previously developed framework that identifies four distinct types of knowledge—declarative, procedural, effectiveness and social—we hypothesize that procedural, effectiveness and social knowledge are important predictors of an individual's participation in sustainable behaviors, while declarative (information) knowledge is not. While the knowledge domain framework has been theoretically detailed by other researchers (19 and 11) and qualitatively assessed through an intensive case study education program (Redman, 2013), to date, this is the first quantitative assessment of the relationship between the four domains of knowledge and sustainability-related behaviors. We tested our hypothesis through an extensive survey of 346 current and future K-12 teachers about sustainable food and waste knowledge and behaviors. The survey results supported our hypothesis that high levels of declarative knowledge alone did not predict increased participation in sustainable behaviors while procedural and social knowledge were statistically significant predictors of sustainable food behaviors and procedural, effectiveness, and social knowledge were all statistically significant predictors of sustainable waste behaviors. Through active incorporation of appropriate forms of procedural, effectiveness, and social knowledge into the K-12 classroom, educators can empower the next generation to make individual changes based on their vision of the future and insist on structural and institutional changes that are essential for a successful transition to sustainability.
Transformative Education for Sustainable Consumption
Trends in Higher Education
Teachers play a key role in the construction of a more equal, fairer and sustainable world. Incorporating education for sustainable consumption into teacher training should therefore be a priority. This education should aim to develop students’ awareness of environmental issues, to encourage lifestyle changes, and to promote reducing their personal ecological footprint (EF). Training processes will hence lead to active learning approaches promoting critical thinking about production and consumption patterns, linking the curriculum content to real life, and involving students in activities that reduce their EF. This paper presents research carried out at three Spanish faculties of education. The main goal is to analyse the relationship between active teaching and learning strategies, and the reduction of the students’ individual EF. Pre- and post-test questionnaires were used to collect data. A total of 93 primary education degree students took part in this study. The results show th...
In response to the increasing recognition of the need for sustainable food systems, research on students' and educators' knowledge of food systems and sustainability more broadly has grown but has generally focused on what people 'fail' to understand. Moving away from this deficit approach, the present study used semi-structured interviews to explore how 12 pre-service teachers (PSTs) in the US consider sustainability in terms of the trade-offsor concurrent costs and benefitsassociated with using different agricultural resources over short, medium, and long terms. Drawing upon the constructs of framing, metacognition, and complex causality, the study found that the majority of PSTs referred to indirect experiences of seeing or hearing about agricultural resources to demonstrate stable knowledge of short-term trade-offs and construct tentative knowledge about medium-term trade-offs. Few described long-term trade-offs. Most participants also acknowledged some gaps in their knowledge in discussing trade-offs across the different time scales. Findings suggest the importance of leveraging and building upon educators' (and ultimately students') prior experiences to build their understanding of complex trade-offs that underlie food systems. The study also illustrates the value of using the concept of trade-offs across time scales to explore people's conceptions and understandings of sustainability.
Proceedings of INTCESS 2021- 8th International Conference on Education and Education of Social Sciences
In 2005 the United Nations promoted the "decade of education for sustainable development" (2005-2014) and the UNESCO Italian Committee instituted the annual "week of education for sustainable development" to raise awareness about the necessity of a fairer and more respectful future for both human beings and environment. Nevertheless, the Italian Guidelines for the Curriculum in Secondary School-Key Stage 3 (2012 Edition) do not include the topic "sustainable food". Whereas, as proved by the scientific research, humans activities concerning food, its production, its transportation, its consumption and waste discharge are one of the most important causes of environmental pollution and therefore it is important to raise awareness and to understand which teaching methods might be the most effective for increasing debate, interest and willingness in order to promote environmental safety. It is fundamental to build an ecological conscience, especially in tomorrow's citizens: today's children.
Joint proceedings of the International Conference on Social Science and Character Educations (IcoSSCE 2018) and International Conference on Social Studies, Moral, and Character Education (ICSMC 2018), 2019
Towards sustainability requires a revolution in understanding and solving environmental problems. Sustainable consumption education is an education that is indispensable to form individuals who have a sense of responsibility towards the environment by being wise in choosing their daily needs. Sustainable consumption education is not a field of study that stands alone, it is integrated into a field of study in school. The Purpose of this research is to develop the model of sustainable consumption education on learning social studies in junior high school to increase student's attention to towards sustainability environment. This study reviews various literatures to strengthen the evidence of the model proposed. It is proposed that various themes on the social studies lesson is believed to be effective way to educate student on the understanding of sustainable consumption issues and make them to make an enough action to show their attention to the environment.