scholarly journals Cultivating Powerful Participation: Reflections from a food justice and facilitation learning experience

Author(s):  
Jamie Bain ◽  
Noelle Harden ◽  
Shirley Nordrum ◽  
Ren Olive

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and heightened awareness of systemic racism this past year, food systems practitioners are increasingly turning their attention toward the intersections of racial equity and the good food movement. Un­packing the racist history of the food system is a key step in this journey toward food justice, one that must be followed by intentional action bridg­ing diverse perspectives through skilled facilitation. Through a project called Cultivating Powerful Par­ticipation, the University of Minnesota Extension and food justice practitioners across Minnesota are working together to equip leaders with the neces­sary relationships, skills, and tools to cultivate a vision of food justice. In this reflective essay, we draw on our experiences leading this initiative to demonstrate the power and impact of approaching food justice through an action-oriented framework that equips community food justice leaders to become seasoned facilitators. Using themes and evaluation data from our program, we share prom­ising practices and specific facilitation methods that others can adapt to embrace a justice orientation in their work.

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 215-218
Author(s):  
Marie Manthey

A history of discrimination against racial and religious minorities at the University of Minnesota, maintained by powerful administrators who were subsequently honored with named buildings, was reflected in acts and patterns of racism in admissions and housing, within the School of Nursing. This article recounts well-documented examples of racial bias, particularly the story of Frances Mchie Rains, the first nurse of color to graduate from the University of Minnesota School of Nursing and a pioneer in overcoming racial barriers.


Author(s):  
Lori Stahlbrand

This paper traces the partnership between the University of Toronto and the non-profit Local Food Plus (LFP) to bring local sustainable food to its St. George campus. At its launch, the partnership represented the largest purchase of local sustainable food at a Canadian university, as well as LFP’s first foray into supporting institutional procurement of local sustainable food. LFP was founded in 2005 with a vision to foster sustainable local food economies. To this end, LFP developed a certification system and a marketing program that matched certified farmers and processors to buyers. LFP emphasized large-scale purchases by public institutions. Using information from in-depth semi-structured key informant interviews, this paper argues that the LFP project was a disruptive innovation that posed a challenge to many dimensions of the established food system. The LFP case study reveals structural obstacles to operationalizing a local and sustainable food system. These include a lack of mid-sized infrastructure serving local farmers, the domination of a rebate system of purchasing controlled by an oligopolistic foodservice sector, and embedded government support of export agriculture. This case study is an example of praxis, as the author was the founder of LFP, as well as an academic researcher and analyst.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 112-152
Author(s):  
Busiso Helard Moyo ◽  
Anne Marie Thompson Thow

Despite South Africa’s celebrated constitutional commitments that have expanded and deepened South Africa’s commitment to realise socio-economic rights, limited progress in implementing right to food policies stands to compromise the country’s developmental path. If not a deliberate policy choice, the persistence of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in all its forms is a deep policy failure.  Food system transformation in South Africa requires addressing wider issues of who controls the food supply, thus influencing the food chain and the food choices of the individual and communities. This paper examines three global rights-based paradigms – ‘food justice’, ‘food security’ and ‘food sovereignty’ – that inform activism on the right to food globally and their relevance to food system change in South Africa; for both fulfilling the right to food and addressing all forms of malnutrition. We conclude that the emerging concept of food sovereignty has important yet largely unexplored possibilities for democratically managing food systems for better health outcomes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-16
Author(s):  
Abimbola Oluwatoni Asojo ◽  
Yuliya Kartoshkina ◽  
Babatunde Jaiyeoba ◽  
Dolapo Amole

One of the requirements for interior design students by the Council for Interior Design Accreditation (CIDA) is to be “prepared to work in a variety of contexts as well as across geographic, political, social, environmental, cultural, and economic conditions.” To help with this preparation, faculty partners from two institutions- the University of Minnesota Interior Design and the Architecture Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria- created unique learning experiences for their students by using Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL). The main goal of this teaching methodology is to develop students’ cross-cultural competence by linking university classes in different countries. Two COIL projects were chosen to help students practice solving design problems while responding to specific socio-cultural contexts. Students from both countries seemed to greatly benefit from this learning experience. Findings from students’ reflections after the learning experiences indicated deeper intercultural sensitivity in their design solutions and appreciation of technology and collaborative teaching in developing this sensitivity. Overall the framework of COIL strengthened the integration of multicultural learning experiences in both settings.  


Transfers ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 115-131
Author(s):  
Lucy Baker ◽  
Paola Castañeda ◽  
Matthew Dalstrom ◽  
Ankur Datta ◽  
Tanja Joelsson ◽  
...  

Nicholas A. Scott, Assembling Moral Mobilities: Cycling, Cities and the Common Good (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 288 pp., 38 illus., $50 John Stehlin, Cyclescapes of the Unequal City: Bicycle Infrastructure and Uneven Development (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 328 pp., 24 photos, 11 maps, 9 tables, $27 Cecilia Vindrola-Padros, Critical Ethnographic Perspectives on Medical Travel (New York: Routledge, 2019), 161 pp., $36.77 Nicola Frost and Tom Selwyn, eds., Travelling Towards Home: Mobilities and Homemaking (New York: Berghahn, 2018), 182 pp., 10 illus., 1 table, $110 Peter Cox, Cycling: A Sociology of Vélomobility (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 200 pp., 2 B/W illus., £120.00 (ebook £40.49) Lesley Murray and Susana Cortés-Morales, Children's Mobilities: Interdependent, Imagined, Relational (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 307 pp., 10 illus., $89.99 Jocelyne Guilbault and Timothy Rommen, eds., Sounds of Vacation: Political Economies of Caribbean Tourism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 234 pp., $25.95 John Krige, ed., How Knowledge Moves: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019), 408 pp., 11 illus., $40


Author(s):  
Joellen E. Coryell ◽  
Trae Stewart ◽  
Zane C. Wubbena ◽  
Tereza Cristina Valverde-Poenie ◽  
B. J. Spencer

International Service-Learning (ISL) is a structured service-learning experience in another country where students learn from interaction, cross-cultural dialogue, and reflection. This humanistic pedagogy was utilized at the University of Canterbury after earthquakes rocked Christchurch, New Zealand (NZ) in 2010 and 2011. The present comparative-case study examined United States (US), European Union (EU), and Kiwi students' transformative learning through working together in a university-based ISL course designed around re-building Christchurch. Data were analyzed through the Kiely's (2005) Transformative Service-Learning Model. The findings of this study contribute new elements to the dimension of the model and argue that the concept of global citizenship may better explain a mixed cohort of international students' service-learning experiences in a post-disaster setting. Implications to the study's findings and recommendations for future research are briefly discussed.


2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-400
Author(s):  
P. K. Rangachari

Twenty-eight undergraduate students in a health sciences program volunteered for an exercise in the history of examinations. They had completed a second-year course in anatomy and physiology in which they studied modern texts and took standard contemporary exams. For this historical “experiment,” students studied selected chapters from two 19th century physiology texts (by Foster M. A Textbook of Physiology, 1895; and Broussais FJV. A Treatise on Physiology Applied to Pathology, 1828). They then took a 1-h-long exam in which they answered two essay-type questions set by Thomas Henry Huxley for second-year medical students at the University of London in 1853 and 1857. These were selected from a question bank provided by Dr. P. Mazumdar (University of Toronto). A questionnaire probed their contrasting experiences. Many wrote thoughtful, reflective comments on the exercise, which not only gave them an insight into the difficulties faced by students in the past, but also proved to be a valuable learning experience (average score: 8.6 ± 1.6 SD).


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