Vermont+FEED

//What organization developed the curriculum module you are evaluating?// Vermont FEED is a partnership of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont (NOFA-VT) and Shelburne Farms of Vermont. The two organizations seek to connect farms to schools via educational endeavors surrounding school food. They have successfully entered over a third of Vermont schools with their hundreds of school programs. //What is the overall mission of the organization?// According to their website vtfeed.org, their mission is: " Vermont Food Education Every Day (VT FEED) works with schools and communities to raise awareness about healthy food, good nutrition, and the role of Vermont farms and farmers. We act as a catalyst for rebuilding healthy food systems and to cultivate links between classrooms, cafeterias, communities, and local farms." //What is the educational mission and philosophy of the organization?// The mission of the organizations is inherently educational and is seen above. Their website also states that they believe in supporting access to safe, healthy food and water to all communities, the positive, direct impact that a healthy diet has on students' academic performance, that school food policy and practice needs to be changed to provide sustainable nutrition to all students, and that growing, harvesting, and preparing food develops critical skills in students including control over their own well-being. //What does the curriculum module aim to teach? What are the learning outcomes supposed to be?// This curriculum aims to forge connections between farms and school communities. It aims to challenge students with addressing food issues within their own classroom, cafeteria, and community, and inform educators on how to encourage the development of food, farm, and nutrition curriculums. //Do you think the curriculum is appropriately designed to produce the intended learning outcomes?// This curriculum details different parts of connecting food to farms and understanding what is behind the food we eat based on the intended age level. While it successfully incorporates hands-on activities, hand-outs, and educator learning and initiative opportunities, the curriculum would only successfully provide the depth of understanding if students followed through the entire set of curriculums throughout their academic life. It provides an excellent start for inquiry and understanding, and does effectively meet their mission of being a catalyst, but each section is not thorough within itself to the whole problem this organization is trying to address. //Does the curriculum teach the kind of literacies advocated by EcoEd? What could be layered into this curriculum so that it addresses more of the learning outcomes advocated by EcoEd?// **EcoEd:** Understanding of their own health and well-being as shaped by an array of both proximate and far-off causes. **Curriculum:** This curriculum successfully links the health of the food students receive at the cafeteria to farms, large and small, allowing them to link their nutrition to more than just the grocery store. **EcoEd:** Understanding of how their actions have an array of proximate and far off effects. **Curriculum:** The hands-on activities and field trips directly link students' actions to their food. For example, in the kindergarten curriculum, each classroom "adopts" a calf at Shelburne farms and visits it regularly to monitor its health and growth. Students must save their pennies to put in the feed container in order to feed the calf while they visit. In tandem they learn about the calf's contribution to the farm and its purpose in the food chain, broadening their view of their actions to the farm's ecosystem and the food cycle. **EcoEd:** Understanding of different scientific disciplines and medical specializations, aware that they rely on diverse methods, produce many types of knowledge, and are ever evolving-- science as a crucial but far from straightforward social resource. **Curriculum:** Across the many curriculums students learn about disciplines of medicine (veterinary, pharmaceutical, human), law (legislation, the FDA) , and agriculture (local farms, large farms). They learn about their relevance, power, and opinions within the US and within the Food system. This highlights the many types of information, relationships and methods are provided by each discipline, including the negative and flawed ones. This successfully teaches this kind of literacy throughout; on an individual basis, the curriculums for older students incorporate this literacy much more effectively, as they provide a more complex view of the food system. The curriculums for younger grades are merely introductions to the world of food. **EcoEd:** Understanding of government at various scales, from the local to transnational made up of diverse agencies and types of experts, which rely on diverse decision-making processes. **Curriculum:** This curriculum effectively addresses this literacy via the method described for the previous prompt. **EcoEd:** Understanding of potential for change, alternative ways of doing things and organizing society. **Curriculum:** The heart of these curriculums is a mission to change how students see nutrition, how schools provide nutrition, and how educators address teaching students about food. Students are directed to different points of change within their school, their community, and the world that would effect their health, with an emphasis on providing themselves with better nutrition. **EcoEd:** Use empirical understanding of complex causation to identify specific points of intervention. **Curriculum:** This curriculum gives students a tour of the various effects of their actions, political actions and dynamics, and many scientific disciplines within the food system. This involves asking them to address ways they could also have an effect that would provide them with better nutrition. Students form a web of cause and effect over time that will allow them to see how they can interfere in a way that will benefit their health now and in the future. **EcoEd:** Recognize the multitude of factors influencing what they are told about environmental problems, including vested interests, disciplinary bias and blindness, and the sheer limits of knowledge. **Curriculum:** This curriculum does not particularly pay attention to connecting food to greater environmental issues. Students are shown the various interests, disciplinary specialties and dynamics, and limits of knowledge within this, but it does not connect them to environmental problems, only to their personal and their community's health. This could easily be changed with lessons added after those provided that looks at why it is important to grow organic and eat healthy food from an environmental perspective (why food from a local farm is not only better for you but for the environment). It could also easily be added into visits to the farm by having students note the environmental impact of certain processes on the farm (for example, why the cow's manure is good/better fertilizer versus chemicals). **EcoEd:** Recognize and productively deal with diverse perspectives, avoiding the paralysis often produced by insistence on "balance" and "consensus" leveraging heterogeneous collectivity and epistemological pluralism. **Curriculum:** Students are taught the many ways they can effect their own health by changing the food system and how to make good choices surrounding their diet. While this is not directly addressed as going against conflicting perspectives, they are shown how to go against the generally accepted method of participating in the system. They are also shown why it is important to understand all perspectives and to take action rather than being overwhelmed by both or only believing one. **EcoEd:** Creative info-seeking practices, animated analytic capabilities, and a capacity to narrate complex chains of events. **Curriculum:** Most activities are inquiry based, providing students the opportunity to view a new system such as a farm and draw information from it, rather than simply reading about it. They then are asked via hand outs and kinesthetic in-class activities to narrate and create links to everything they observed, effectively enforcing this literacy into their experience. **EcoEd:** Understanding of the challenges and value of deliberation and cooperative action. **Curriculum:** Much of the curriculum extends what students learned about having control over their own health to controlling the health of their community. They learn about VT FEED's actions in their local community and state, showing how teamwork within organizations and schools can have a positive impact on their own nutrition.