Tour after the networking workshop

Tour of Rhode Street after our networking workshop

Food Around the World

Food and families around the World: This was the great resource that was shown at our workshops that gives us some insight into family food expenditure and favourite foods – in 2 formats.

The food and families images within a suggested learning experience

http://efs.tki.org.nz/Curriculum-resources-and-tools/Food-and-families-Around-the-World

The original photos from Time

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1626519_1373680,00.html

.....which seem to come from this book......

Further sites that may have useful ideas and resources
http://www.nourishlife.org/ - this website has a range of resources to support our kaupapa - teacher guides, video clips, teaching and learning activities and stories about what different schools have done. There are a range of short video clips on food and communities (ones I thought might be useful in classes were Food Chain, Apple Seed). Also have a look at the teaching resources. The food systems area has examples of food cycles.


Great meals for a change is the website that the poster that we looked at in the network workshop. http://www.greatmealsforachange.ca/project-materials.php#tool-kit

http://www.greatmealsforachange.ca/userfiles/Sustainable-Food-Habit-Poster.jpg

Some of you are looking at who your community is, what defines it and the diversity within. Books to connect into a unit about Identity and Belonging:

The Tree by Bob Darroch

Hundreds of years ago a tiny seedling struggled for life in the New Zealand bush. Then, as chance would have it, a mighty giant fell and gave the little tree a chance for life. Through this beautifully illustrated story we follow the life of this tree as it, in turn, grows to be a mighty giant. Along the way, we see the changes to the landscape and the arrival of new creatures to the land where the tree first grew.

 With this book what you could do is adapt it to be something in your community that you tell the story of what ‘goes past’ each day and how together we all make up the wonderful fabric of our communities. It could be that for schools with a range of cultures that a ‘cultural’ meal for groupings is prepared under the tree and shared with all of the community that goes past….

Jeannie Baker has a wonderful series of textless picture books that work incredibly well in the context of Identity

http://www.jeanniebaker.com/picture_books_index.htm Belonging - perfect for looking at how community can come together to create spaces for everyone and everything.

This blog has an interesting commentary of Jeannie’s work that you might find interesting http://trevorcairney.blogspot.co.nz/2012/05/jeannie-baker-revisited.html

Her latest book Mirror is not one that I am familiar with but it sounds again like an interesting work that could be used within our setting – there is a left hand and right hand story tracking the lives of two boys one from Sydney and one from Morocco.

Laying down a challenge

One of the touchstones of this project is about being innovative and trying new things that haven’t been developed elsewhere in the Enviroschools network – pioneering is the word used on the MoU! At our latest meeting we talked about how we wanted participants in this project to try some new things.  Whether these are successful or not is part of our learning. An important post script to that statement is that what we try needs to sit within the project direction of developing innovative, action and learning projects.

The title of the project taking the next step points to challenging ourselves through this project to consider what is the next step in terms of the Enviroschools kaupapa. So for example we know that we can create wonderful gardens on site in our schools however, if we are taking the next step – what does that look like? Will all of our learning and action take place within the confines of the school site or will there be a merging of school and community other than on the school site? Growing food is challenging once we start looking at on-going supply. Therefore, how can we broaden our engagement and influence in a way that involves more people, participation and more places. In what ways can we explore alternative ways of accessing and sharing kai? Are we doing things that haven’t been tried/developed before through the Enviroschools network?

Sample Responses

Sample of responses to the questions that align with the project sponsors perspective

What does the project title of Enviroschools taking the next step: Sustainable Community through kai mean to you?

·        Taking what we do and developing our resources in our community to a more purposeful sustained way.

·        To make it an authentic need/action in our school

·        Working as one community to care for, share knowledge, skill and time to provide food and excess food for each other

·        The key as I see it is that collectively as a group of schools committed to the Enviroschools’ kaupapa, we are going to take that illusive “next step” and strive individually and corporately to create aspects of authentic sustainability in our schools and communities through the meaningful context of kai.  Schools do a great job of growing things but this next step is more than that and is like stepping up and taking our place in the world and making a difference locally and globally.  If everyone, everywhere focused their learning on how it can make a positive difference for others, then our world would be a much better and brighter place. 

·        Buy in from the community to ask – what if we can half our food bill? What if we can eat healthy food that we have grown ourselves?

·        Moving beyond what we know works within our schools for developing sustainable practices such as organic gardens to empowering others in and as part of our communities so that healthy nourishing food is accessible

·        How we bridge gaps and work with our community to see which parts of the food cycle we can influence or develop to be less energy demanding, more efficient in the use of resources, produced and accessed locally

·        Sharing what we have learnt in our school settings with and through our communities so that people in our communities are not hungry

What might be the benefits of this project long and short term?

Long term

·        Connections between community members and learning and sharing of knowledge

·        Life is not a throw away/consumable lifestyle

·        Enduring understanding – action and consequence we are all connected and need to be sustainable

·        Being well planned for next year

·        Learning to grow food bring new people in, empowering adults to have confidence to help the school

·        Inclusive community for all cultures

·        Sharing knowledge from all cultures

·        Short term – comfortably belonging to a community

·        Food for those who need it

·        Skill sharing

·        Conversation

·        Ako

·        become part of a school culture in all its dimensions

·        This project creates the conditions for looking beyond our individual schools and creating a learning community focusing on sustainability and changing practices at a school and at a community level. 

·        Contributing to action learning that will inform best practice through the Enviroschools foundation,

·        Creating sustainable change in schools and communities.

·        Developing students’ knowledge and understanding of creating, building and strengthening sustainable communities through kai.

·        Students driving school wide initiatives and developing leadership, practical and life long learning skills.

·        Parents, families and whanau developing knowledge and understanding of sustainability and taking active steps to make a difference too.

·        Re-connecting of communities to enable equitable and empowered learners and teachers

·        Good food available to all parts of our community

·        More people living, learning and earning in the community that they are in

·        Perhaps a shift in economics or the way that we think of ‘jobs’ that are valued, so that growing food or making food accessible to all is a role that is enabled by the community

Short term benefits include:

·        the development of a supportive cluster with a common professional learning focus,

·        positive networking across schools and areas,

·        the development of authentic learning contexts for students,

·        focused topic for inquiry,

·        strong level of support from facilitators,

·        more produce = healthier students

·        Re-defining who is a teacher and who is a learner

·        Ideas about how to make the lines between community and school less visible

·        Students living and learning in their community

Asphalt to Ecosystems

http://www.asphalt2ecosystems.org/home

This is one of the books that we looked at during our network afternoon.

Kitchen Garden Foundation

The Kitchen Garden Foundation began in Melbourne in 2001.

Stephanie Alexander has written some amazing cookbooks and some especially for working with children.

This cookbook is separated into seasons. 

It also reminds the children what ingredients they can get from their gardens.