Cultivating Critical Learning: Critical Food Pedagogy in Foodshare's School Grown Program

There are numerous problems created by the industrial food system. These include redefining the relationship between eaters and their food as one between a consumer and a product, and the concomitant consumer deskilling and lack of knowledge around all aspects of food production; impacts to human and ecological health; struggles for farmers; a loss of culture and sense of place; numerous forms of injustice; and the gross misuse of waste as an industrial output, rather than an ecological input. Academics, activists, not for profit organizations, and laypeople often state that better education around food can help to solve these issues, at least in part. However, this raises questions around the purpose, praxis, and impacts of food education, and its role in change: Can food education programs teach a critical perspective on the food system? Or do they reinforce dominant paradigms around food while teaching only particular aspects of food literacy?

This paper seeks to determine what knowledge and skills students gain in FoodShare's School Grown program, a secondary school market garden-based food and employment education program. It then asks whether the knowledge and skills gained foster a critical/emancipatory perspective or learning on the food system. It uses a case-study approach relying most heavily on interviews with the program coordinator, five graduated students, two teachers, two principals, a social worker, and a guidance counselor at the two schools involved in the program, as well as program documents, direct observation, and publicly available media.

The paper begins by exploring issues in the industrial food system for which education is often purported to be a part of the solution. It then outlines the theoretical framework of critical food pedagogy and several related concepts: ecological literacy, transformative learning, and critical place-based pedagogy. These concepts are applied to the idea of food literacy, building off of the work of Goldstein (2014) and Sumner (2012) to create metrics for measuring three kinds of food literacy: empirical/analytic, historical/hermeneutic, and critical/emancipatory.

The paper explores related models of school gardens, farm-to-school programs, and youth employment market gardens before describing FoodShare's School Grown program model and the results of the research. The data indicates that the program greatly impacts personal and interpersonal knowledge and skills, employment skills and opportunities, overall learning skills, and builds empirical/analytic and historical/hermeneutic food literacy knowledge and skills. In terms of critical/emancipatory learning, the program fosters and supports the beginnings of critical/emancipatory perspectives on food and related systems. The program also builds skills and knowledge that are linked to prosocial and proenvironmental attitudes and behaviours, and are ultimately related to critical/emancipatory learning, such as a sense of personal and group competency. The paper concludes by offering recommendations for supporting critical food pedagogy in the School Grown program. The findings can inform all food education programs that wish to foster critical perspectives on the food system.