Improving Nutrition Students' Teaching Self Efficacy Through Leading Cooking Classes in the Community

Abstract

Instructors in nutrition need to provide students opportunities to apply academic material and improve teaching skills; service‐learning (SL) is one option. The objective of this study was to determine common challenges among SL students to identify ways to improve their teaching, thereby improving SL outcomes and community programming. Students in this study taught cooking and nutrition classes in the community. Throughout the semester, students critically reflected on their SL experiences. Researchers qualitatively evaluated learnings to determine themes. Students realized that: their personalities impact interpersonal relationships with others; they have unrealistic expectations of peers and community agencies and participants; they are quick to get discouraged when faced with barriers in the community; and they need to be able to adapt their teaching styles to different program participants and improve their communication with community partners and team members. After identifying learnings, instructors can target future instruction to increase students' self‐efficacy and improve the outcomes of SL for the students and the community. SL is an effective way to expose students to the interpersonal communication skills necessary to be a community educator. An NC State Undergraduate Research Grant and Park Scholars' GRASP funded this research.