CFE Reflection – Week 1
What a week.
To be honest, I was quite hesitant going into the CFE. What am I going to do? Is any of this going to be relevant to teaching in the classroom? Before coming to the farm, I have had several people tell me that I will just be a workhand, leaving me little opportunity to bring much into my own practice.
Thankfully, that is not the case.
I was extremely delighted to find on my arrival that I will be writing a lesson for one of the high school tours. That’s not to say I don’t want to do any gardening work (part of the reason why I signed up to be at the farm was so I could learn a few things and start a garden at home), but I was not looking forward to 3 weeks of hard manual labour. Before I write a lesson however, of course I had to learn a lot more about some of the programs at the farm, so I spent the first few days reading and being involved in some of the programs.
Tuesday was a project work day. I was provided with an extensive list of online sites and books to look at so that I may have some sort of idea of what this lesson will be about. I thought I would be able to tackle all of the web sites; there were only 5 on the list! But embedded in those websites is a plethora of resources, to lesson plans, to just general information, and going through all of it was extremely overwhelming. However I did decide on what the lesson will be about: Food miles. Looking at all the energy put into food from production to transport, and comparing the miles in conventionally grown foods to the food grown at the UBC Farm.
On Wednesday I was able to participate in the Feast Bowl. The Feast Bowl is an event that is held once a month and is an Indigenous Research Partnership with the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at UBC. Almost all of the food comes from the Indigenous Health Education and Research Garden (IHERG) and everyone is welcome to join. The concept of “food as medicine” is very prominent; everything is organic and locally grown or caught. In the winter, food that has been processed in the summer and autumn are used.
It was a fantastic experience. My part of the Feast was helping to prepare the food, and the not-so-fun clean up afterwards. I had my first bannock! Bannock is traditionally deep fried, but this version was healthy in that all organic ingredients were used and it was baked in the oven. It was absolutely delicious, and I think I may like to include the recipe into my own lessons. Through this experience I learned that I am not very well versed in identifying fresh herbs, but more importantly, I realized that I know very little about the traditions of the First Nations people. For instance, before we ate a prayer was held by one of the volunteers. Being of First Nations descent, he held a small bowl with little amounts of all the food we were about to eat while saying the prayer. I later learned that it was an offering to the spirits and to invite them to join us in our meal.
I’m really glad I got to partake in the Bowl. Everyone involved is so extremely welcoming and are happy to have help. I know my experience was unique; normally the Feast Bowl coordinator, Hannah Lewis, and some volunteers would meet earlier in the day and head down to the IHREG to harvest the crops while some stayed in the kitchen to do prep. The produce was already picked for us on this particular day, though I would have loved to help harvest some of the crop! I’m already thinking about participating in the future and will look into my schedule in the upcoming months. If you want to participate, the Feast Bowl is held on the last Wednesday of every month at the UBC Longhouse. I will provide a link here.
Thursday was a great day in that I was finally able to observe a few tours. Luckily there was a high school tour and it got me thinking about how I can get this age group interested and engaged in the tour. In this particular group, some were really into the tour and asked a lot of great questions, but the majority of the group looked like this was the last place they wanted to be. It was such a contrast to the second group later in the day. The second group only had about 6 students between the ages of 6-12, whereas the high school group consisted of 35 15-16 year olds. The younger group also had a more hands-on activity than a walk-around tour (they made seed tapes to be used in their own garden!). I think the biggest challenge for me right now is thinking of a hands-on activity that secondary students will actually be interested in and enjoy.
Today, Friday, is a work day. I planned to finish a quick outline of a lesson, but it seems to be working out into 3 lessons; 1 sort of pre-lesson to be done a day before the visit to the farm, the lesson actually done at the farm, and a follow up lesson done after their visit. I still want to do something about food miles, but with limited access to materials this is turning out to be quite a challenge. Maybe a skit can be done to demonstrate where food comes from? A cost analysis? Or maybe they can take a favourite dish and recreate it with food items found on the farm? There’s so much to explore, but being creative is more difficult than anticipated. Something to definitely mull over the weekend.
Photos to come!