During the last week of November, my team has been hard at work in finalizing the tasks associated with our project outcomes. The FAQ and scientific component for addition to the manual has been revised and would be ready to send off to our community partner along with our final report.  The final report is close to being completed; we have yet to proofread and fine-tune specific sections, such as the discussion, before it is ready for submission. Furthermore, we have been fulfilling the expectations of our blog webpage. My team found it difficult to upload pictures and other media of our CBEL experiences online due to the nature of our project (mostly literature review) and not having the opportunity to carry out and capture our community service learning.  Listening to other LFS 350 group’s plenary presentations during the previous week was helpful in assembling and delivering the final presentation. It has helped to highlight aspects that we should have considered while designing and carrying out our project as well as to suggest further community engagement activities for future groups continuing our work.  We also had the pleasure of Shona and Darlene from Fresh Choice Kitchens joining our class for our final CBEL presentation.  We appreciate that they were able to take the time to witness the product of our combined efforts over the course of three months. We are extremely grateful to Shona, Diane and Darlene for their time, resources, patience and feedback we received in making this project a success!

After combining the interview responses with the results from our literature review into our discussion, we can conclude that food literacy does play a role in contributing to greater food security through empowering individuals in the community to improve their health by seeking greater resilience and social adversity. This is agreed by most of the interviewees who cited that home canning motivates others to preserve backyard grown fruits and vegetables, learn food preservation techniques and have a greater consciousness with regards to food consumption. Our literature review has also provided support for our findings with a notable article by Andress et al. (2011), who noted household’s increasing interest in long-term home preservation during times of food insecurity and the emergence of NCHFPP, a website that offered canning techniques and a self-study canning course that was created in response to the demand. Many of the registers cited food culture, food safety, home gardening, health & nutrition and economic self-sufficiency as motivators for participating in the online canning course; hence this implies the public’s interest to maintain food security through increasing food literacy (Andress et al., 2011). A significant aspect that emerged during our research and interviews is the importance of considering the cultural appropriateness of the canning workshops for the community. Incorporating culturally appropriate recipes is essential as it increases the application of techniques learned at home, which thereby promotes food security. Our team also drew up a list of recommendations that may be beneficial for similar projects with Fresh Choices Kitchens in the future. Some of the recommendations include developing different versions of the canning manual with different languages and corresponding cultural foods and uploading an electronic version of the FAQs and tutorial videos online. Future LFS 350 should organize a focus group, preferably with canning workshop participants, instead of individual interviews in order to gather more detailed responses and save time.

Each member of my team had a rewarding CBEL experience. Some of us reflected on learning to listen to the feedback and what the community needs rather than what you think they need, which in hindsight, could have reduced the number of miscommunications and problems when developing our research question.  Some found the interviews a very insightful experience as listening to the community facilitators opens up further possibilities of community engagement.  Others appreciated the opportunity to build social relationships with group members and the community through flexible learning.  Despite having to overcome the hurdles, our team learned quite a lot from our project, community partner and each other; we truly enjoyed our CBEL experience and would not have traded it for another project!

Before we know it, there are only 3 weeks left until the end of the term! At this time, our group is shifting our focus from the canning manual to our final paper.

As mentioned in the last blog, our group had originally planned to conduct the phone call interviews at the Food Bank last Wednesday, Nov. 6th. However, since only two of the interviewees confirmed by Wednesday morning that they would be free to do the interview in the afternoon, we finally decided to stay on campus to conduct our interviews through Skype call.  Later, two more participants confirmed that they were available for the interviews. As the interviewees are from not only Vancouver, but also further regions such as Vernon and as far as Toronto, Jasmine created a Skype account specially for our interview and kindly paid for it in advance.

After revising the interview questions with our community partner, we decided to ask 2 questions regarding the usability of the FAQ section which we added to the canning manual (part I), and 2 other questions related to our research question (part II). As the participants of our interviews include both canning trainers and environmental health officers (EHO), we made two different versions of the questions for part I:

 For canning trainers:
1.    After reading through the FAQ, would you be able to answer these questions yourself if they were asked by your canning students?
2.    Were there any FAQs that you did not understand?  If yes, how could it be made more clear?

For EHOs:
1.    Is the information provided in the FAQs accurate?
2.    How could the information in the FAQs be made more clear?  (if they ask for this question to be explained, ask if these answers would be understandable to the general public or ask what grade level they see this info as geared towards?)

 For part II:
3.    In your opinion, do you think educating people on home preservation contributes to a person’s food literacy?
4.    In your opinion, how does educating people on home preservation improve a person’s food security?  Does it improve their health?

We had originally planned to interview 4 of the participants on Wednesday afternoon. The first interview with a EHO went well and he provided us a lot of valuable advice on how to improve the FAQs, as well as his opinions on the questions related to our research project. Unfortunately, we could not reach the second interviewee at the scheduled time, and the last two interviewees had not finished going over the manual and we had to reschedule the calls to other dates with them. In the end, after spending more than 3 hours meeting together to conduct the interviews, we were only able to interview one person successfully. Nevertheless, in between the scheduled calls, our group managed the time wisely to discuss different aspects of the project, including dividing up the remaining  interviews between the members, clearly defining designated parts of the final report and reconfirming our internal deadlines.

We were able to conduct five more interviews during the week. However, there are still some participants who were not available last week, thus we will need to continue, and hopefully finish, the remaining interviews by the end of this week. Fortunately, from the interviewed participants, we were able to gain many helpful suggestions about the FAQs of the canning manual. Most of them state that some terms used in the FAQs may still be too professional for the general audience to understand, and some of the answers may be excessively detailed – more than the general public will be interested to know. Therefore we have immediately started revising our FAQs accordingly. Participants also gave valuable opinions on our research question which, as mentioned in the previous blog post,  relates food preservation methods with food literacy and food security.

Much to our surprise, there were also many unexpected changes to the interviewing schedules. We originally expected that all interviews would have been completed last week,  thus currently we seem slightly behind our proposed schedule.  Nevertheless, in the mean time all members have begun working on their designated parts of the final paper. We will also continue the literature review on our research question and investigate how past studies may relate to the data collected from the interviews.  By the end of this week, our group expects that all interviews will be completed and that a draft paper will be formulated so that we could prepare for the plenary presentation next Wednesday.

Thanks for reading our updates! See you again next week!

With October coming to an end, our group has been focused on completing the scientific component for the canning manual.  While reviewing the existing manual, we were surprised to find that most topics had already been covered in great detail, despite being written at a grade six level.  Thus, instead of introducing a new section, we believe that it would be more useful to provide the trainers and/or their trainees with a 2 to 3 paged summary, highlighting the major topics and expanding on the details with scientific principles. This summary is nearly complete and would be sent off before the interviews with the trainers.  Meanwhile, we have finalized the one-on-one interview times with the Fresh Choice Kitchen’s canning trainers. We are looking forward to speaking with the trainers in hopes of addressing the usability of the manual and answering our finalized research questions, which are:

“To what extent does educating people on home preservation contribute to a person’s food literacy (in the aspects of understanding how and where the food is produced)? How would this result in improving food security with regards to personal health?”

We have received plenty of constructive feedback from our community partner on the FAQ and our list of interview questions for the trainers.  While every group member could attest to our efforts in conducting extensive research and generating appropriate responses for the FAQ, we appreciate their feedback and agree there is opportunity for further improvement.  Due to the familiarity and frequent usage of the scholarly language on campus, we acknowledge that it was fairly difficult for us to determine whether the language was at the grade six level. Hence, it is interesting to see which sections we thought were understandable, but were in fact deemed relatively complex for our selected audience. On the other hand, our group was quite disappointed by their response regarding the interview questions. After directly discussing with our community partner, we understand that there was simply a miscommunication between both parties, which was resolved upon direct communication over the phone. Considering the importance of community consultation as emphasized by this week’s e-lecture by Ernesto Sirolli, my group is extremely grateful to Drew for offering to call and resolve the misunderstandings with Fresh Choice Kitchens.  At the end the conversation, we are happy to report that everyone is on the same page.  Our initial interview questions were replaced with a set of new interview questions that were created together with our community partner. There will be two questions dedicated to the usability of the manual and two for our research question.

Since the trainers are from different regions of BC, instead of a focus group discussion (which we have previously planned), we are going to interview the trainers individually via telephone. This will slightly be more time-consuming for us, but  it is beneficial in a way that the participants will not be affected by opinions of others, therefore eliminating the bias effect that a focus group might cause on the participants.

For the remainder of the week, our group will be making our second site visit at the GVFBS, where we will be conducting the one-on-one interviews with the canning trainers on Wednesday and wrap up on Thursday using Skype. The FAQ revision will also be done at that time with our community partner.  Throughout the next two weeks, we will be working on the final report and continue to review scientific journals. Once we have compiled the responses from the interviews, we can incorporate the findings to our final report.  Despite the approaching deadlines, we—as a team—are confident in overcoming any more challenges that may come our way!