Bringing Curriculum Down to Earth: The Terroir That We Are

• In Event: Sensual Curriculum: Making Educational Sense Through the Senses

Abstract

In this paper, the authors outline theoretical and practical considerations that arise out of their autobiographical curricular research into place, identity, and food. The authors explicate, through theoretical discussions, examples of praxis, and poetic interludes, how an attention to food and identity is a necessary curricular endeavor and one that engages the senses in attempts to make sense of self and world.

Terroir is a term that refers to how certain places produce certain identifiable qualities in wine and agricultural produce. Current notions of terroir include an attention to the human and cultural attributes of a place that influence the local terroir (Cho, 2010; Korsmeyer, 2005; Trubeck, 2008). The poststructural perspective that places influence people and vice versa informs this paper, and the authors acknowledge how this perspective is reflected in their own identities regarding their relationship to foods and places.

Regarding the quintessential curricular questions, What is worth knowing? and How do we come to know?, they posit that an attention to how we eat and use the world (Berry, 1990), as a curricular endeavor, is an acknowledgement and validation of embodied or somatic and visceral, sensual knowing. It is a celebration of, and attunement to, the everyday experiences in human lives. The notion of terroir is explored as one possible approach to “bringing curriculum down to earth” and to dwelling in the humus (Aoki, 1991/2005) we share with other living things.

While questions of “how we eat and use the world” allow a curricular focus on environmental education, these questions also highlight the politics and power that are associated with our most basic human endeavor. Food production and dissemination remains one of the most common colonizing activities in the world today, and a study of terroir encourages questions regarding who decides what will count as knowledge (for example, why isn’t the production/use of chocolate widely included in history, home economics, the social studies and world issues curricula), and whose knowledge will count.

The authors have employed explorations of terroir in their graduate and undergraduate teaching and along with their students, they have inquired into the pedagogical considerations and possibilities that present when the senses are engaged in teaching and learning.

Along with a series of six vignettes that illustrate how food and place have influenced their identities and vice versa, the authors offer the reader some of the strategies that have transformed their praxis when working towards an educational philosophy and curriculum that honors terroir not only as a theoretical or conceptual idea/ideal but also as a viable and sensual embodied practice.

The authors mix abstract theoretical discussion with examples of concrete praxis, and suggest that this mixing is a significant and necessary curricular endeavor for better understanding the terroir that we are. Bringing their explorations of terroir down to earth in both literal and metaphorical senses, the authors provide a unique approach to incorporating an attention to food and place as a valid curricular endeavor.

Authors

• Wanda Hurren, University of Victoria

• Erika L. Hasebe-Ludt, University of Lethbridge