Making the curriculum relevant to the students

  If we expect students to apply what they learn inside the classroom to make healthy food choices in their lives outside the classroom, then it is critical that the unit of work planned for the students is relevant to them.

An effective strategy to ensure that both the content and the learning strategies are relevant, is to provide a democratic learning environment and to negotiate the curriculum with the students.

Using a democratic approach means that students are involved in deciding what it is that they want to learn about, and letting them determine how they will learn. By allowing students to participate in decisions about what and how they are going to learn, they develop greater ownership, understanding and control over what they are learning, they are more likely to practise what they learn outside the classroom.

So, for example, within a topic "What? Me have a healthy diet?", students might analyse their diets and find that they all have different goals. In a democratic learning environment, students would then each pursue their own goals.

This is very different from a situation where the teacher determines that, for example, all students will plan and prepare low-fat, low-cost meals , apparently making the assumption that all students need low-fat and low-cost meals.

Co-operative learning

Co-operative learning has long been recognised as a powerful strategy in nutrition education. It is easier to bring about changes, whether personal or in the broader community, when students work in groups on a task. When students work co-operatively in peer groups, they can help each other understand the information, support each other in achieving their goals, and give each other ideas and encouragement. Co-operative learning supports the notion of everyone in the group being successful, and that everyone can make health promoting choices.

It is easier to bring about changes if students work in groups which they have decided themselves (part of democratic learning). Typically, the students will elect to work with their friends and this will enhance their chances of success. If they share their goals with their friends, then the friends can help each other achieve the goals. It is appropriate that students should work with their peers - after all, it is their peers that they will be with at the school canteen, at the fast-food outlet or at home after school.

Developing a deep understanding of concepts and processes

Although, by itself, knowledge is insufficient for creating behaviour change, knowledge of concepts and processes is an important component of being in control of food-related behaviours. Part of the motivation to change behaviour comes from understanding the benefits of such change. Similarly it is important that students understand the processes which facilitate change -decision making, problem solving, and particularly the empowerment process. If students are to learn such content and processes effectively, then they need to take a "deep" approach to learning.

In thinking about "deep" approaches, it is useful to start at the other end of the spectrum - superficial approaches. If students are told information, just read information, or copy it into their books, then it could be considered that they have taken a "superficial" approach to learning, and it is unlikely that they will integrate this information into their cognitive structures and use and act on the information. If students are asked to answer some simple questions about the material - answers to which are readily found in the material provided - then they start to search for more meaning in the information. This can be taken further whereby students start to, for example, solve problems in relation to the material, make judgments about the information and re-conceptualise the information into another form, or debate hypotheses related to the information. The students are taking a deeper approach. Students might go on to explore questions such as "Why is this written like this, in whose interests is it for this information to be presented like this? Would someone else present the same information with different biases? Why?"

Metacognition

It is impossible for students to learn at school all they need to know for the rest of their lives in relation to food and nutrition. Even if they learn about nutrition relevant to the whole of the life cycle, it is likely that by the time they reach another stage in the life-cycle that much would have changed: research related to nutrition; the foods available; the appliances to prepare food. Students need to know how to access information, and how to make judgments as to whether or not the information is valid. They need to understand, for example, the processes in deciding if a food choice is supportive of their goals, the processes in learning how to use equipment, the processes in planning. And of course, this includes the very important process of learning how to bring about change in food related behaviours, whether personal behaviours or those of the community. Students need to "learn how to learn".

Giving students opportunity to bring about change in a range of contexts

It is unlikely that engaging in the empowerment process only once will enable students to be in control of their own food-related behaviours, or to be able to take action to promote a healthier society. Students need to practise the process in a variety of situations.

At a personal level, students could go through the empowerment cycle with a view to examining the snacks they eat, another time perhaps looking at their lunches, another time looking at specific nutrients, all dependent upon their age and abilities. At a societal level, they could go through the cycle using the media as the context, another time using the local environment (school, supermarkets) as the context, another time using fast-food as the context. Repeating the process will develop skills which can be applied in other places at appropriate times.