Cultivating Critical Food Literacies: Mapping the Civics of Food Injustice in a Place-Based Curriculum

• In Event: 68.061 - Roundtable Session 30
  In Roundtable Session: 68.061-16 - Space and Place in Curriculum Studies

Abstract

This paper explores the development and implementation of a critical food literacies (CFL) curriculum—a place-based food justice curriculum developed alongside the teachers and majority Latina/o 7th/8th grade students of a civic-education classroom. This paper uses the experiences of the researchers as a foil to discuss the possibilities of critically incorporating food and place into curriculum.These critical possibilities are primarily illustrated through student-created maps that identify and interrogate local and industrial food networks and the students’ place in it. By drawing from the student maps, observations, and researcher experiences in the field, this paper illustrates the complex social and political geography of food, and the need for food to be reconsidered as a necessary variable in social justice civic-education.

Authors

• Gardner R Seawright, University of Utah

• Clayton Todd Pierce, University of Utah