Welcome back to Group 8’s blog! Keep reading to learn more about our weekly objectives and achievements, as well as our upcoming objectives. There will also be some discussion around some key moments that have happened in the course and their relation to our personal lives as well as the course material and readings.
Weekly Objectives
- Design workshop 1:
- lesson plans and learning objectives
- content and activities
- practice timing of workshop
- Reflect on our proposal report and presentation.
Achievements
- Successfully completed workshop 1 lesson plans and learning objectives including all activities and practicing the portions of the workshop we will individually be leading.
- Reflected on our proposal report and presentation by using the rubric and feedback provided. We also considered our personal observations from our report and presentation.
Upcoming Objectives
- Implement workshop 1 successfully on Wednesday October 21, 2015.
- Reflect on workshop 1 after it is completed.
- Plan workshop 2 based on reflections and feedback.
What, So What, Now What:
A moment of significance during LFS 350 for our group has been when we were unsure of our expectations for our project from our professors, teaching assistants and our community partner. We were unsure of how many workshops needed to be presented, as well as the extent since our topic had changed. This uncertainty caused some tension, however it led to the opportunity for us as we were able to design workshops around our own interest. Similarly to the three stories from the podcast which had their own unique themes of tension.
The first story, The Fish Bank, has correlation to our workshop topic as it shows the importance of food literacy. We are working towards educating our future society so they may be knowledgeable about their food and are able to make wiser decisions in the future. To help tackle this, we are presenting a workshop to grade 5 and 6 students which introduce topics such as food groups and food literacy.
The second story, Grandma Mahembe’s Farm, also relates to food literacy. Lindiwe is an overweight mother of three whose eating patterns changed when she left her rural hometown for education in London. She does not realize the problem until she attends a conference about Food Security, where she is responsible to address the food security issues in Africa. Being the ambassador of Africa, she is ashamed of her obese image and how she is not representative of the hungry population of the nation at all. After the conference, she recognizes the need to adapt a healthy lifestyle in which she switches her diet from pop and processed food into whole foods grown in her mother’s garden. This story is relevant to us: as living in Canada, we all face similar struggles with our Northern American diet, especially when fast food and junk food culture is so prevalent in our current society. It is crucial for us to look at our lifestyle and eating habits and reassess our relationship with food. Moreover, Lindiwe’s experience delivers a message:
We must be the change we want to see in the world.
In order to educate food literacy to the students in Livingstone (Or even broader audience, such as young children in Canada), we must believe in what we do and execute our passion in food knowledge. After all, we are the role models, teachers, and the people they look up to when they think of the relationship between food and their health.
The third story, A Pragmatic Idealist, was about overcoming the awkward silence surrounding disease. When Sisonke finally took the opportunity to listen to her friend, she realized that Prudence, who was living with AIDS, had been terrified even though she had always appeared strong on the outside. This story touched home for one of our group members, Holly, as she volunteered in Honduras working with people living with HIV/AIDS, where similar struggles around the stigma of the disease exists. Learning how to listen can be harder than learning how to speak. When we go out to work on our projects in the community it is important to hear what community members have to say. We must actively listen to the 5th and 6th grade students with whom we will be working with in our workshops.
In our discussions around these stories we came up with the common theme of listening, similar to our discussions from our first blog post! Referring back to our tensions around our project expectations, we agree that listening was a key aspect in determining a potential solution. Our tensions were relieved by listening to our feedback from Will and Carrie, which helped us solve our problem and allowed us to proceed in the development of our project.
Thank you for reading and we look forward to sharing our progress with you next week!