Let’s put that lesson plan into practice!
This lesson plan is meant as a starting point for the unit on food and power structures within Canada and the rest of the world. Power structures are a key idea for anyone to understand, and one of the goals of this unit is to introduce students to the idea of power in a condensed and easily accessible informational layout.
Students would also be taught about culture in a simplified way for basic comprehension on the topic. The reason why we need to introduce students to these basic terms is to ensure there is some sort of shared understanding on the important terms that will be used as discussion points when it comes to the issue of food choice and mentalities.
The lesson fits into a larger inquiry goal of getting students to start re-imagining how Canadians engage in their relationships with food, culture and identity. This lesson will get students to share their food experiences with their peers and from that shared experience they will work together to forge new paths forward for young individuals to interact with their food sources as elements of both nourishment (nature) and identity (culture).
The expression of all of these lessons for the unit is to have students reconfigure the concept of the Canadian Food Guide, where they would work in teams and create a new Canadian Food Guide that could be sent to various governmental officials who can affect systemic change.
Below are some elements to my lesson.
The first element is my actual lesson – in powerpoint format:
This next document outlines how my lesson relates to some of the inquiry based materials from our course
Food As Literacy and Application to Inquiry Course
Feedback and Reflection:
The feedback was overall extremely positive.
- The powerpoint is a really nice way to guide the inquiry, set the standards, and the learning targets.
- padlet, a nice way to engage, reflect on food hlikings, associated with culture
- Having students “name and claim” …LOVE!
- There is a nice flow to the lesson. Each concept is building on the other (Power, symbol, culture) #interdisciplinary
- Relation to the food demands, eating habits, culture and history
- Great connection to First People’s Principles.
- Inclusive and diverse
- Suggestion- Division of lesson into two or more like one with culture or other with power, inquiry can take it to several unexpected ways.
- To include formative assessment was great
My Reflection on the lesson and the feedback:
I felt that the feedback was extremely beneficial to me when it came to planning out the rest of my unit.
I am the type of teacher that just wants to ‘jam’ as much cool information into one class as possible. However, based on the feedback from my peers, perhaps it’s better to give students time with all of the concepts I’m offering them by dividing up my lesson. I think my peers are correct in suggesting that maybe an entire class can be dedicated to power and cultural concepts – even before any discussion on food takes place.
I am constantly thinking about how each lesson can have a mini inquiry project within the larger overarching task for each part of the unit.
One thing that I didn’t mention in my write up – but will mention here is that I am constantly thinking about the marginalized students in my classroom and how my words might impact their mindset differently than a ‘status quo’ student attending my class. I told my peers that I purposefully built into my lesson opportunities for students to ‘search’ for food items or ‘seek out alternative means of discussing work and sharing their ideas with a larger group’. I want to ensure that every student feels supported, welcomed and accepted in my classroom. I do not want to create any environments where I ‘food shame’ students aka point out or signal their poverty to the rest of the class with our food tasks and disucssions.