Food for Thought: Building Socially Conscious Readers and Writers through Exploring Eating Practices and Sustainability Perspectives

Abstract

Food for Thought: Building Socially Conscious Readers and Writers through Exploring Eating Practices and Sustainability Perspectives Silvia Rodríguez Sabater Globalization in the twenty-first century has created new and interconnected challenges for everyone, especially for the current generation of students in our classrooms. Language learning can be part of the solution, by opening students’ eyes to the social, cultural, economic, and environmental issues around the world. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) has been advocating for the inclusion of the 5 Cs—Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities—since 1996. More recently, the publication of Words and Actions: Teaching Languages through the Lens of Social Justice (Glynn et al. 2014), and second edition in 2018, shed more light on how to teach these challenging topics. Recently, the Modern Language Association (MLA) has called for proposals on the “greening” of the Spanish curriculum for their 2020 convention. University students are and will be faced with complex twenty-first-century economic problems, such as food deserts, costs of industrial agriculture, organic regulations and market demand, sustainable food systems, value of traditional ecological knowledge, and regulations and business ethics related to food. These economic problems cannot be separated from social problems, such as political implications from food insecurity, loss of traditional ecological knowledge around food issues, food ethics, GMO vs. non-GMO debates, nutrition issues, speciesism in agriculture, policy, and regulations around food. In addition to the varied economic dimensions, environmental problems require creative answers to tackle the impact of industrial agriculture, agricultural pollution and runoff, climate crisis and agriculture, and deforestation and agriculture. Immediate solutions are required, and we need to equip our students with the tools to address and solve such real-world problems. In other words, the Spanish language classroom can be a crucial part of the education of globally prepared solutionaries, individuals able to address and solve issues (Weil 2016) and who are sustainability literate because they have the knowledge and skills to advocate for resilient social, economic, and environmental systems. The College of Charleston has made these concerns part of the Quality Enhancement Plan and has encouraged faculty to create courses in all fields of study. 1. The Case of SPAN 313: A Composition Course An intermediate composition section at the College of Charleston was taught in Spring 2019 aimed to build socially conscious readers and writers through exploring eating practices and sustainability perspectives. The course learning outcomes are: 1. sustainability literacy (identify various elements of sustainability in the Spanish-speaking world, key ways to be more sustainable in personal life, and the relationship between social/cultural, economic, and environmental factors); [End Page 155] 2. the development of interpretive reading and listening (understand, interpret, and analyze what is heard, read, or viewed on a variety of topics related to food practices and sustainability perspectives); 3. the development of presentational writing (present information, concepts, and ideas to inform, explain, persuade, and narrate on a variety of topics related to food practices and sustainability perspectives using appropriate media and adapting to various audiences of readers). The course themes are: 1) food deserts and social justice; 2) diets (Mediterranean diet, plant-based eating, and Mexican gastronomy); 3) habits (milk alternatives, organic produce, local products, drinking straws, and disposable products); 4) traditional agriculture and foods of Latin America (Mesoamerican chinampas and Andean terrazas); and 5) fair trade chocolate and coffee; and 6) cattle raising and deforestation. Students read authentic texts written by Spanish native speakers for members of that culture, and they interpret the texts by identifying key words, the main idea(s), supporting details, and the organizational features and author’s perspective, inferring meaning of unfamiliar words, and identifying cultural and sustainability perspectives. A list of these texts is included in the Appendix. 2. Presentational Writing Activities Students carry out a variety of presentational writing activities such as essays, discussion board posts, summaries of food and sustainability events on campus, and on invited speaker talks to class. The writing activities were structured according to the guidelines for ACTFL proficiency, beginning with writing assignments that asked students to narrate and describe, and then propose and persuade. The assignments increased in length and expectations for vocabulary and...