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Amplifying the Voices of Youth to Improve School Lunch and Mitigate Climate Crisis (Poster 16)

Fri, April 12, 3:05 to 4:35pm, Pennsylvania Convention Center, Floor: Level 200, Exhibit Hall A

Abstract

The purpose of this study is twofold. One, understand various perspectives of the stakeholders in the school food system regarding the problem of food waste and their proposed solutions. Two, examine the type and nature of students’ civic actions to mitigate food wastes in their school community. Employing participatory design research (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) and community ethnography (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2019), youths, educators, and researchers co-designed activities to explore and address the problem of food waste at the school cafeteria. The study context was a year-long interdisciplinary climate change course at a public high school in the pacific southwest of the United States. The participants were about 70 students who enrolled in the course including seven student researchers, five teachers, cafeteria workers, two custodians, and four administrators. Student researchers co-designed the unit and participated in data collection and analysis. Data sources include: a) interview transcripts with multiple stakeholders, b) youth survey and c) learning artifacts produced from the co-designed unit. The analysis reveals that stakeholders attended to particular aspects of the food system when framing the problem and proposing solutions, while rarely connecting the system and scales. It shows some discrepancy between the framing of the problem and the proposed solution. For example, many people attended to the existing policies and practices that caused food waste at the school, but they rarely proposed a solution or actions to change the policies and practices, instead, the most common proposed action was increasing people’s awareness. Based on the analysis about stakeholders’ perspectives, students took civic actions as a collective to address both the issues of increasing awareness and changing policies. Together, this study shows one possibility of leveraging students’ voices and agency through a collaborative partnership with researchers in the context of climate change education

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