”Mat ett sätt att engagera alla i skolan”

Jason O’Rourke har under många år arbetat med att låta maten prägla undervisningen i sin skola och han är en flitig föreläsare där han delar med sig av sina lärdomar och erfarenheter på området. En viktig aspekt av hans arbete är hur skolan involverar vårdnadshavarna och lokalsamhället.

– Mat är något som förenar oss alla socialt. Alla har en relation till mat, vare sig det är positivt eller negativt. Mat kan kan engagera vårdnadshavare och öppnar många fler dörrar än till exempel matematik eller historia. Föräldrar får till exempel ta med sig bröd från sin kultur till skolan. När de sedan väl är i skolan kan man diskutera andra aspekter av deras barns lärande, säger Jason O’Rourke.

– Det handlar om att titta på mat från nya synvinklar, det handlar inte bara om näring utan att försöka använda sig av aspekter av mat i olika delar av undervisningen och barnens lärande. Om hur mat även kan förbättra barns mentala hälsa, om hållbarhetsfrågor…säger han.

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Transcription

Jason O’Rourke is an award-winning director at the Washington Borough Academy in England who is passionate about food, especially how to use it as a pedagogical tool and how to make it a part of the school’s education in many different areas. Pedagogue Malmö had a talk with him when he visited Malmö and lectured at the Hyllivång School.

Jason O’Rourke, headteacher at Washington Borough Academy, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you very much, thanks for inviting me on to it.

First of all, tell us about your school.

My school is a primary school. We take children from the age of three in our nursery up until the age of 11, year six. 300 children are in the school and it’s in a place called Lincolnshire, county of Lincolnshire, about four miles outside of Lincoln.

Summarise for us, what’s the whole school approach to food education?

It’s looking at food from a different lens, really, not just as a nutritional benefit to children, but seeing how you can incorporate food aspects into all areas of children’s learning and their engagement as well. So looking at the social aspect of food, looking at the physical aspect of it, looking at how it can improve children’s mental health as well, but also building up on the knowledge and skills that children can acquire. Okay. Really immersed in all elements of food.

We’re talking about things like sustainability which are of course key to climate change and aspects of how food can be detrimental to that or food waste can be detrimental to that. We’re looking at areas how it can improve geography, history, literacy and maths work. So seeing it as a kind of fulcrum or a way that children can engage in all types of different learning.

So in your view what is the the big points of why is there a need for food education like this?

I think it’s getting a better relationship with food for children that will impact them not just in their lives now but also their lives in the future and that can have a positive impact in their health, their physical health. We have a big issue worldwide. with childhood obesity but also malnutrition as well with the different types of ultra-processed foods that children are being exposed to which isn’t giving them the nutrients, the vitamins that they need.

So there’s that element of it but also the sustainable issues of food and how that can their relationship with food, how we engage with food on a wider level can have a really positive impact on sustainable issues such as food waste, such as biotoxicity, diversity in gardening and that exposure to different types of food that also helps with children’s mental well-being as well. So the engagement that you get, the possibilities that food can bring are really wide-ranging.

What in your view is the success factors when it comes to incorporating food into the teaching and learning curriculum? Not just some subjects but the whole area so to speak.

I think it’s about buy-in. I really do think it’s about school leadership. I think if the head teacher and the senior leadership teams and school principals understand the importance of food and what pleasure it can bring to children and the impact it can have on their lives and their community as well then it can happen in schools. So in my experience if school leaders get it they can impart that down but also I think it’s about looking at what curriculum our children need currently.

We’re in 2023. We need to be creating learning environments that are relevant to their lives that will have a positive impact in their lives going forward and I believe that food is the key to that. So if we look at it from that angle we know that children enjoy it, they get a great deal of satisfaction and pleasure and it changes their habits, it widens their palates and their interest in food and their engagement in food and that’s only going to have a positive impact on them and wider society.

I think some curricula are very stuck in the past, are very siloed into certain subjects that you have to teach and not fully engaged in what issues our children will face going forward. They need to be engaged in a lot of softer skills and social skills in elements about sustainability because these will affect our children. And if we can look at the curriculum and think what do we want our children to be at the end of it? How do we reach that goal and then build it from the ground up? I know that food will be a big element to that because it’s something that we all hopefully engage in three times a day.

We all have a relationship with food. Unfortunately over the past 15-20 years it’s become quite an unhealthy relationship. We have, I’m just talking from the UK where I’m from, we have 65% of the day we eat healthy food. The diet that children eat is made of ultra-processed food, food that’s made in factories. This is having a really negative effect on them physically and mentally. That’s going to be a big burden on society going forward, not just the health system but also society in general.

So if we can look at ways that we can improve that and look at the curriculum and think about the engagement we want, the needs that we want, I think that would be a really, really good way forward.

How do you work in your school to achieve that? How do you achieve this, the whole school approach to food? For example, the teachers get the opportunity to practice on their cooking skills?

Yes, we do that. I think your key resource in the school is your teachers. They’re the people who are in front of the children, engaging them, teaching them all the knowledge and skills that you think are important. Teachers need to be trained up. We do a lot of continuous professional development with teachers so that they feel comfortable with it. If teachers are anxious about food and about cooking food or developing recipes, then that is going to be put onto the children as well. They’re going to feel the same.

So put a lot of training and support in for teachers and they will be your champions. They’re the ones that do it. Get a structure behind it. Look at your timetable. If you think this is really important, and I of course argue that it is really, really important, then create time in your timetable for it. We create time weekly for our food education elements and then get a structure to it. Get some programmes of study. Give that structure so that teachers are comfortable with the knowledge and skills that they’re doing and give them time to practice those.

You also created a kitchen garden. Can you tell us about that?

Yes, our school kitchen garden we’re really proud of. It’s a 300m2 organic kitchen garden. We also have a big polytunnel as well. We have an apiary with four beehives and we have a heritage apple orchard with apples only from our area, from Lincolnshire. The kitchen garden is wonderful. It is, as I said, organic. We only plant heritage and heirloom varieties of vegetables. Two reasons. One, because there is such a plethora of fantastic different types of vegetables and fruit that the children can have experience of. But also it enables us to do things like seed sowing and it enables biodiversity, which is a key thing in today’s society.
That we’re not just limiting ourselves to a very few foodstuffs. We’re exposing the children to all the benefits, nutritional benefits. But also the pleasure of different types of foods.

That kitchen garden, the produce from that is used within our food education lessons as part of the teaching and learning. But it’s also used within our school kitchen as well. And the children are there planting the seeds, nurturing the seeds, weeding, watering, harvesting it, taking it up to the school kitchen. And then they’re more inclined to eat that because they’ve seen it from seed to plate. How do you find the time to do that?

How do you find the time to do all this, you know, besides all the other subjects?

You make the time. If you think this is important, as I said, I’m in a very unique, really good position of being a headteacher of a school. And thinking about what is important for our children. I think this is as important as maths and English, if not more so, because it’s to do with our children’s health. And your listeners there, a lot of them will be parents. And they know that their children’s health is the most important thing. If your children are healthy, then they can do everything else and start to do the academic subjects. If they’re not healthy, then, you know, of course, we worry about it, it affects us as well.

So if you want that to happen and you want children to get that really good, healthy relationship with food and how that can benefit them, not just now but in the future, then create that time within the curriculum to do it. You can argue that point. I argue that point with people who come in and say, this is really important. It’s the hearts and minds type approach. And every class in the school is partnered with a local farmer.

How does that work?

Yes, something called farmer time. And it’s a fantastic, we started about two or three years ago, where we’re working with an organization called Leaf Education, which is do with farmers. And they went out to the farmers that work with them and said, would you like to do some lessons with children? So every two weeks. 20 minutes. The farmer links up through video conference with the children, children in the classroom, and they are being shown around the farm. They’re looking at the agriculture. They’re looking at the animals there. They’re going into the tractors. They’re going into the granaries. It’s a really, really good cost effective way of children seeing where our food comes from, seeing, you know, the kind of job and what all of that entails. It’s really good.

Because if we would take to take children out to farms, it would cost us an awful lot just in transport and the logistics behind it as well. We were doing a project with the municipality of Vannersborg a couple of years ago, and they were so enthused with this that they’ve taken that farmer time on in their area as well, which is really great to see.

And how do you engage the parents in this work?

They’re also engaged in this. I think it’s a lot to do with, as I said at the beginning, you know, food is something that connects us all. It’s a social glue. Everybody has a relationship with food, be it good or bad. If we all then talking to parents and getting them into the school, food opens a lot more doors than, say, maths or Swedish or, you know, the history or whatever it is. Food, people have that relationship with it. We have kids. We have cultural evenings around food. We ask parents to bring in their bread from their different culture and bring it in. And they’re just really, really well received.

And once you’ve got parents coming into the school, you can then work on other aspects of the children’s learning as well and have those conversations with them. That connectedness between the school and home, it can be created through food education.

You also talked about in your lecture about the teachers, that they really have the power to do. How can you make a difference when it comes to children’s approach to food? Could you develop on that?

Yeah, the relationship that teachers have with children is a unique relationship. It’s a wonderful one. It is what, when we do our food education, especially sensory food education, taste ed, a method that we’ve helped set up. If you’re asking children to try different fruit and vegetables that, you know, they’re being, they’re experiencing within the lesson, it’s a different thing than if you’re doing that at home. There’s a lot of emotional relationship, of course, between parents and children. But with the teacher, children have a different view on that. And they probably readily try something. A teacher asks them to.

But they’ve also got that peer pressure. If a child has not eaten, say, a plum before or has not eaten, like, a piece of anchovy or some peppers or whatever,
they’re not really inclined to do it if they’re in isolation at home. But if they’re friends, if a student is trying it, they’re going to look around and their other friends are trying it. They’re thinking, I don’t want to be left out here. They try it and they realise, oh, that’s really quite nice there. So you can use those kind of relationships that they have within the school environment to support the work of food education.

That’s interesting. Have you noticed any difference or improvements in other areas in school when it comes to children’s approach to learning or the environment?

I think it’s, especially with our school lunches, we’ve got to, there is a connection with the fuel, if you call food, in that that we’re putting into our bodies and our output. If you are putting high levels of fat and sugar into children, you’re going to get the peaks and then you’re going to get the lows. And you can have that in a school day. Children have small bodies, so it goes through them a lot quicker. If you’re feeding children really healthy food, if you’re engaging them with really healthy food, they’re going to be more alert. They’re going to be more inclined to do their learning. That, I believe, will help. And that will improve their academic outcomes as well.

So how did you as a head teacher engage in food education from the beginning? Where does your motivation come from?

I think it’s just a personal thing. I look at my primary learning and the work that I did with that. I look at my home life. My mum was a fantastic cook. I did gardening when I was at primary age. I had my own little plot and I was planting things and getting a lot of pleasure out of it. And then we come into the position of being a head teacher and thinking, what is it that really engages? And I reflected on myself and thought, that was something that was really good. But as I said before, food is something that we all have a connection with. It’s something that joins us all together. One of the very few things that does that.

Use that as a teaching tool. Use that as the fulcrum to move on to other things and expand on it and grow and layer it, like an onion, into other areas of learning. And we do get that engagement. Children absolutely love the lessons. You don’t have to have a pen and a piece of paper with this and record everything. You’re experiencing it. If you’re using all of your five senses, as we do with our taste set and our sensory food education thing,
it’s so immersive. And children get an incredible amount of joy and pleasure out of it.

Could you give a practical example of how you develop education from, for example, some type of food, a potato or something?

Yeah. We can look at a potato and we can think, right, historically, where does that come from? Where did it first arrive from? We can look at South America. Then you look at the Aztecs and you look at all of the Montezuma, the Spanish conquistadors. Then you look at the potato coming over to England, especially in the, I’m talking England, being an English head teacher here, in the 16th century. So Walter and I. And we were talking about the relationship with the Aztecs and the relationship that they had with the Aztecs, which at first they didn’t use. They thought it was a poisonous plant. And so you’ve got those elements and you can look at different foodstuffs.

So think the orange carrot, which was, you know, they’re not naturally orange. They’re naturally purple. And they came from Afghanistan.
And they’ve come over and they’ve been genetically changed and adapted to become more palatable and linked with William of Orange. And so history tells us. So there’s all these fantastic stories around. Food. And foodstuffs that children get really immersed in, you know, really engaged in the geography, the food miles, the science elements of it, the literacy of describing the tastes and the smells and the touches that you have to do with food.

Vocabulary is incredible. To wrap things up here. If you could give some advice to the head teachers or teachers listening to this who wants to
organize and develop their food education, where do you think they should start? I think be brave. Do be brave. Think about what is our core purpose as educators. It is to make our children’s lives better. We’ve got a problem with children’s health and well-being. Okay. Worldwide. We’ve got a problem with childhood obesity. We’ve got a problem with non-communicable diseases like type 2 diabetes, certain types of cancer, certain types of heart disease that can be linked to food and the intake of food and the intake of unhealthy food. If you really want to make a difference as a head teacher, which we all do, that’s where we’re in the job for, to make a difference.

So there’s children that walk through our doors every day. Food has the power to do that. It has the power to engage. It has the power to learn other areas of the element of the curriculum. But it also has the power to bring, as I, you know, lovely that I can use these last words for everything, those elements of joy and pleasure. And we’ve got to be mindful that that’s what education should be about as well.

Jason O’Rourke, thank you so much.

Pleasure. Thank you.