There is no lecture, lab or tutorial for this session!
Session Objectives:
- Travel to your assigned school as a group.
- Meet school stakeholder(s)
- Discuss details of your food literacy workshop
- Determine key components of the school’s food system for your system map (for your school food system + workshop update assignment)
Guidelines for a successful and productive first visit:
- Send an email 1-2 days prior to remind school stakeholders of your visit (include date, time, location, purpose, and estimate duration of meeting)
- Arrive early as a group and meet at a pre-arranged location outside of school grounds (* TIP: schools generally don’t like randoms lurking around).
- Introduce yourselves
- Ask how many students are in the class and that the teacher pre-assign VSB students into small groups of appropriate sizes for your activity (i.e in a class of 25 students, 5 groups would be appropriate).
- Discuss the nature of the workshop and ask for advice on ways to make age-appropriate adaptations to the workshop. You may want to ask if the VSB students have previous experience gardening/cooking as a class. Have they participated in the Growing Chef program? Spuds in Tubs program? Earthbites? For activities that require food preparation and/or tasting you may want to ask the teacher about hand washing protocols (Is there a sink in the classroom? Should the whole class go to the bathroom to wash hands at the beginning of class? How much time would this take? Can the students go in pairs to the bathroom? etc.)
- Ask about any technical logistics of the workshop, i.e. can we have access to the oven? the fridge? a dishwasher? tea pots? electric kettles? can we set up early? do you have a class set of dishes? etc…
- Ask your school stakeholder about school food system assets (but in plain language; for example: Does the school have a kitchen or garden or compost system? Who uses it? Does the school have a meal program? How is it structured? etc…)
- Limit your interviewing to 45-60 minutes to be respectful of the school stakeholder’s time.
- Ask the school stakeholder if it would be acceptable for your group to email him/her/them with questions, ideas or more detailed information to help prep for your workshop. If you do email your stakeholder make sure only one person from your group is in charge of communicating via email (and always ‘cc the rest of your group to make sure everyone is on the same page).
- Thank the school stakeholder for her/his/their time.
- Leave time before or after your visit to walk around school grounds to look for food production, processing, preparation, consumption and compost systems for your systems map.