Yesterday I debuted my Rites of Passage workshop at New Alternatives for Children (NAC). I expected a lot of awkward silence, but there were so many talkative and knowledgeable people in the room, and many of their questions and comments pushed me in exactly the right direction. I have a lot to process, but I’ll offer some initial observations here: (more…)
I’ve been debating whether or not it’s a good idea to have students keep a food journal. It’s really quite a chore to keep track of everything one consumes on a daily basis, it might detract from the enjoyment of meals, and as with any sort of diary, it could feel like an invasion of privacy. Nevertheless, I think there are some benefits to the exercise. (more…)
I mentioned wanting to teach a program on food and nutrition that gives participants the tools to develop healthful (and joyful) eating habits on their own, rather than one that mandates a strict regimen. This does not mean ignoring others’ recommendations and encouraging everyone to eat willy-nilly. To the contrary, this means doing the work of comparing different dietary guidelines and evaluating them. One way of going about this is by looking at graphic nutrition guides such as food pyramids. (more…)
Part of my fascination with the chicken nugget issue is that it raises the question not only of what we feed our kids, but who decides what they eat in the first place. The story of Stacey Irvine, the seventeen year-old who collapsed after a steady diet of almost nothing but chicken nuggets since the age of two, is an extreme case of what could happen if we let kids set diets entirely for themselves. In her own defense, Stacey’s mother said that her daughter presented problems that her other two children never did with respect to their eating habits. They even happily consume plenty of fruits and vegetables. Stacey, however, shunned all foods to the extent that for her mother it was a relief when she discovered her daughter’s penchant for chicken nuggets.This got me wondering just how persistent adults should be in ensuring that kids get a healthful and varied diet. (more…)
It’s been awhile. In my time away from the blog I began developing a food a nutrition program. Let me explain. It all started with a weird news story someone sent me about a seventeen-year old British girl who collapsed after a steady diet of chicken nuggets. (Indeed, she had eaten almost nothing but nuggets for the last fifteen years, with nary a fruit or vegetable in the mix.) The story led me to a video of chef Jamie Oliver attempting to educate a group of young kids on the poor nutritional value of chicken nuggets. The effort was featured on Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, a show with the ambitious mission of changing the way Americans eat in a two-step process. First, Oliver educates the American public on the dangers of processed food. And second, he teaches parents, teens, and even cafeteria workers how to cook healthful meals from scratch.
You may have already seen the clip below, since it’s gotten quite a number of plays on YouTube. Oliver introduces the segment by saying how he’s designed this brilliant experiment that has never failed him in the UK. Basically, he shows how chicken nuggets are often made not from whole chicken breasts, but from a pink goop that results from ground up chicken carcasses. This goop is then pushed through a sieve to separate all the hard bits out, and then a bunch of additives are then mixed into the “batter.” This mixture is then formed into little patties, which can be breaded and fried. Seeing the process firsthand is usually enough to put people off nuggets forever. Well, as you’ll see below, the experiment is an utter failure with the American kids. After eewing and yucking their way through the demonstration, after the nuggets are all fried up, they are still eager to eat them.
If we seek to change people’s eating habits for the better, it’s important to ask why the experiment fails. (more…)
I am still making my way through the Teagle anthology on assessment, which I can’t recommend nearly enough to educators who are invested in bettering their teaching practice. Today I read “Fearful Symmetries: Rubrics and Assessment” by Sarah Webster Goodwin. You might be able to tell from her title that Goodwin is a scholar of British Romanticism, and her approach to education owes a lot to Blake’s notion of poetic or prophetic learning, which goes beyond what is known and taps into something (you guessed it) sublime or ineffable. The most engrossing part of her article detailed a particularly novel project assignment she handed a freshman class in Skidmore’s interdisciplinary Human Dilemmas seminar. (more…)
The value of Barbara Walvoord‘s contribution to Heiland and Rosenthal’s anthology on academic assessment is spelled out in its title: “How to Construct a Simple, Sensible, Useful Departmental Assessment Process.” Before she gets on to that task, however, she clears up a few misconceptions about assessment. One is that assessment can in fact be consonant with both the values of academic departments and the requirements of external evaluators. Another is that assessment is not a tool to evaluate faculty, but rather a “systematic collection of information about student learning for the purpose of improving that learning” (336). The formula she gives is stunningly simple: set your learning goals; decide on at least one direct measure (eg, faculty evaluation of student work using detailed rubrics) and one indirect measure (eg, student surveys); and use the information to improve curricula and teaching.
What makes her article especially compelling is that she departs from that rather benign definition and pushes us to think broadly about what counts as student learning. Echoing Donna Heiland’s language, Walvoord asks, “How we might assess our most ineffable goals—qualities of mind and heart that we most want the study of literature to nurture in our students?” (336) (more…)
Before I finally declared a major in Latin American studies I remember considering both English and history and thinking to myself that I surely wouldn’t do well enough as a history student because I was so bad at remembering dates. I was reminded of the folly of my reasoning by Michael Winerip’s statement of the most valuable lesson he’s learned from his AP American history teacher:
I have long ago forgotten the content of those lessons, but Mr. Noyes instilled in us something far more important: the understanding that history does not come from one book. While that idea has served me for a lifetime, I do not believe it is quantifiable.
Perhaps it isn’t quantifiable in the sense that it isn’t the sort of outcome that can be gauged in a multiple choice exam, but Donna Heiland gives me hope that we might be able to capture evidence of this insight by sharpening our assessment techniques.
At any rate, I am motivated to begin a list of some of the big ideas I gleaned from my college experience: (more…)
I intended to go over some of Heiland’s sample survey questions as examples of evaluative tools that are able to capture meaningful data in the humanities. But I think I will postpone that post until I have read a bit more on the topic. I have heard wonderful things about Read more…
I began discussing Donna Heiland‘s views on assessment in yesterday’s post and today I wanted to take a closer look at her article, “Approaching the Ineffable: Flow, Sublimity, and Student Learning,” which is part of the volume of essays she edits, along with Laura Rosenthal, on the topic of accountability and assessment in the humanities. Heiland brings a unique perspective to the problem as a former literature professor who now works in grantmaking. She inhabits the world outside the ivory tower while very much remaining a member of the tribe, which positions her to be a wonderful interpreter for the assessment and the educator camps alike. Having been trained in literary study, she is someone who speaks our language and sympathizes with many of our concerns. During the MLA panel discussion on assessment I found myself much more drawn to her sensible, and yes, pragmatic approach to assessment than I was to those of the professor who unequivocally rejected assessment on the grounds that it was a practice that privileged the visible and representable (I am paraphrasing, but the key terms are hers). (more…)