Ideologically driven educators know that the biggest decisions many children make every day is what they are going to eat. So what better way to ensure that they buy into a particular political belief than to tie their meal choices with your political agenda?
A new educational software application under development at the University of Illinois does just that with middle school students on the topic of climate change. The program according to its developers show kids “how their dietary choices affect the planet.”
Kids fill their dinner plates on the Food for Thought app by touching the computer screen and dragging their food selections onto the plate. Their choices are then assigned a value based on nutritional data and the “carbon footprint associated with each food item.” Those values would include things like how much water is used to grow the lettuce in the salad they selected.
“There are two learning goals here: Make kids aware of the causes and impacts of climate change, and help them become data literate — that is, knowledgeable consumers of the media,” said curriculum and instruction professor Emma Mercier in the press release.
Researchers studied the kids from University Laboratory High School in Urbana, Illinois, “as they explored climate change issues at the local and global levels,” looking for exactly how much support students needed to “interpret the data and how they used the information.”
The researchers report that the students then visited Illinois Digital Ecologies and Learning Laboratory (IDEALL) in the College of Education at the university. There they entered the contents of the food diaries that they had kept over the previous weekend.
The students were able to view their dietary carbon footprints. Those kids were then “challenged to create a meal that had the least impact on the environment yet still provided sufficient calories.”
“The excitement level — and noise — in this room was astounding,” Mercier said in the press release. “The teachers who observed their students’ work in the lab said that even the kids who are usually difficult to engage were very engaged with this activity. The students saw that they play a role in climate change and that even the small choices they make do matter. One student said the curriculum had prompted her to order something other than a steak while eating out at a restaurant with her parents.”
“Using food as the focal point for promoting awareness of climate change was really brilliant,” said University Laboratory High School science and engineering teacher Sharlene Denos, whose students were the Guinea pigs.
“Seventh- and eighth- graders don’t have control over what cars their families buy or whether they retrofit their homes, but they are in charge of their food. The thought process with the app is one that they can take with them to the grocery store. It’s something that can really empower the students to keep thinking about environmental issues and keep the conversation going with their families and friends.”
Mercer claims that developing technologies for teachers to use in teaching children about climate change is important because climate change is associated with more than 40 percent of the disciplinary content in the Next Generation Science Standards for kindergarten through 12th-grade education adopted by the Illinois State Board of Education in 2014.
The truth of the matter is that climate change theories are not just in Illinois standards.
In 2014, the Tucson Unified School District, with financial assistance from the Qatar Foundation International (QFI), sent educators to Washington D.C. for the International Baccalaureate Conference of the Americas to attend the Beyond Food and Flags presentation. That presentation focused in part on “Themes of global significance,” which included global warming, energy consumption, and waste disposal.
Educators who attended he Beyond Food and Flags presentation, were warned against the “Two common traps for teachers:” Universalism and Multiculturalism.
According to the power point of the presentation, Universalism is the “belief that there are some universal truths, not influenced by culture, which frame the study of particular disciplines. The argument is used most often for math and science.” Multiculturalism “is the acknowledgement and introduction of other cultures to the classroom, though not necessarily in meaningful way.”
In April 2014, teacher Angela Walker attended the IB Category 2 Environmental Systems & Societies training in Dubai, UAE. The UAE sessions included: The Ecosystem, Human Population, Carrying Capacity and Resource Use, Conservation and Biodiversity, Pollution Management, The Issue of Global Warming, and Environmental Value Systems.
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The data that Mercer’s team collected during the trial with the University Laboratory High School students will be used to “better understand how learners engage in collaborative problem-solving and to develop technologies that support collaborative learning about climate change. Mercier plans to apply for additional grant funding to refine the Food for Thought app, with the goal of making it available to area schools in the near future.”