Growing Healthy Kids: Social and Emotional Learning in a Farm-to-School Program

• In Event: 3429 - Section on Sociology of Education Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 20. K-12 Interventions and Academic Achievement

Abstract

Research is demonstrating how important students’ physical, social, and emotional health is to their academic and later-life success. Increasingly, schools are hosting farm-to-school programs, which provide a way to facilitate connections between health, academic learning, and students’ social and emotional development. This study seeks to contribute to our understanding of whether farm-to-school programs influence students’ socio-emotional development and the mechanisms by which social and emotional learning is transmitted. Drawing on surveys with teachers, administrators, and students and classroom observations of a farm-to-school program in Washington D.C., this research finds that a farm-to-school program has the potential to help students cultivate self-awareness, relationship skills, social awareness, and self-management. By explicitly teaching these skills through hands-on learning activities, farm-to-school teachers make socio-emotional skills visible and accessible to students of a wide range of social classes and income levels, potentially helping to reduce inequalities in students’ access to these skills.

Authors

• Katie Kerstetter, George Mason University

• Jennifer Mampara, Director of Education, FRESHFARM