There are only two more weeks before the Bloomington Community Orchard begins its weekly open house-style workdays. This means I'll be beginning participant observation and first-hand participation, beginning to map how workday participants engage with the site. This involves getting into gear on IRB paperwork and finalizing the structure of my research questions. While on spring break, I've been gathering exciting reading: actor-network theory (ANT), non-representational theory (NRT), feminist qualitative research methods. The result of my research I'm most eager to delve into is bringing ANT and NRT into conversation in the Orchard landscape. I'm interested to see, through mapping participants' movements through the Orchard, who and what the key players are.
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So, about a week ago this New York Times infographic, combined with rewatching the documentary Food Fight and re-reading Julie Guthman's "Bringing good food to others" while preparing lesson plans, brought a few things to a head for me, and I wanted to share them briefly here.
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This semester, I'm teaching the first course for which I've determined all content and class structure. While teaching English in France, I created my own lesson plans, but my role was to support the content of the other half of the course. Now, fully on my own, I almost didn't know where to begin. The course, G306 (a topics course on community gardens & community orchards), is a second eight-weeks class that meets for 2.5 hours at a time. How do you keep undergraduates engaged, eager, and challenging their own perceptions? What's the best balance of reading and other forms of content? How do I not just spend most of the time clicking through pun-filled PowerPoint slideshows?
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