Bringing Food Issues and Minnesota History Together, a Project

For Eco Education, sustainability is a community effort. By providing teacher professional development and on-going classroom support, and by helping bridge classrooms with the larger community through community partners, we're better able to provide students with the opportunities, experiences and tools to effectively foster change in their communities. Our belief is that the experiences students have will provide them with the knowledge and the skills necessary to inspire, and hopefully instill, ecologically sound decisions and actions in their communities for days to come.

Paul Sommers, a middle-school teacher at Minneapolis' Anthony Middle School, has been working with Eco Education to integrate the Urban Stewards program into his social studies courses for three years. Last year at Anthony, he incorporated the environmental service-learning program into the existing Minnesota history curriculum. The combination was a natural fit. Sixth graders in Sommers' five classes studied food issues alongside their exploration of Minnesota's agricultural history. Students learned about what Minnesota settlers grew, what life growing up on a sod farm was like and the differences between diversified farming, sustainable farming and mono-crop farming. Students even ground wheat by hand to bake their own bread!

To connect learning to life, students kept food journals which helped them to follow their food choices and analyze their values related to these choices: was it time, cost, taste or production that most affected what they ate?

Students also made connections to the community, by not only inviting a variety of community speakers to visit the classroom including a conventional farmer, an organic farmer, a researcher on bio-rationals and a speaker on biogenetics, but by taking to the community themselves. Students divided into three groups to take a full day to explore the following places: a conventional and certified organic family farm in southern Minnesota, the Mill City Museum and a conventional as well as a cooperative grocery store. These diverse experiences helped students understand the relationship between the history of land use and agriculture, and the choices that people make surrounding food: both in how it is produced and how it's packaged and sold.

Next, students took action by planning to build raised-bed boxed gardens as a way to promote growing healthy food in local communities. To do so, they used the help of Eco Education's Americorps Promise Fellow, Monica Cuneo. Cuneo and other Americorps Promise Fellows, along with local high school students, built and planted over 14 gardens for local communities. At Anthony, students used this example as a catalyst to make contact with Second Harvest Heartland to build 10 vegetable gardens at various distribution sites within Minneapolis to increase the access of healthy, community grown produce to families most in need. They also built six vegetable gardens at Garlough Elementary School in St. Paul. Garlough will be using the gardens as learning tools as they convert to an environmental magnet.

The connections students made at Anthony last year to food, to history and especially to the community, are extremely invigorating. Sustaining our communities and our world is an impressive and difficult undertaking, but when we're able to join together in a network of community support and resources, the impact of our actions becomes truly sustainable.

Eco Education: www.ecoeducation.org