Abstract
The study and pursuit of “Urban Agriculture” takes the form of food-based education at the Dalton School (a private K-12 institution in New York City founded in 1919 by Helen Parkhurst). Working with and within the constraints of an urban environment, the Dalton School utilizes a flexible and adaptive approach to food-based environmental education in order to provide the basis for more holistic approaches to environmental sustainability. Dalton actively engages students to think of themselves as stewards of the earth and their community, and both curricular and extra-curricular activities aim to do so. From the creation and maintenance of a “Community Supported Agriculture” (CSA) enterprise, to a “Pop Food” course, to a senior history elective on the study of food production, to a grade-wide emphasis on sustainability in the second grade, and the recent construction of an in-house teaching kitchen, Dalton provides multiple opportunities to engage ecological and environmental issues through the study of food. The ultimate goal is a curriculum that is vertically aligned and introduces developmentally appropriate curricula in terms of both content and practice and thus creates continuity between the grade levels. Additionally, a food-based approach to environmental education can demystify traditional notions of nature (and the preconceptions that attend to it) and open up a pathway for examining issues of personal identity and ethnicity, social justice and racial inequality and providing an anti-racist framework of analysis and action.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Barber, D. (2014). The third plate: Field notes on the future of food. New York: The Penguin Press.
Berry, W. (2009). Bringing it to the table: On farming and food. Berkeley: Counterpoint.
Claassen, M. A., Klein, O., & Corneille, O. (2016). Poverty and obesity: How poverty and hunger influence food choices. European Health Psychologist, 18(Supp), 337–339.
Committee on a Framework for Assessing the Health, Environmental, and Social Effects of the Food System; Food and Nutrition Board; Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources; Institute of Medicine; National Research Council; Nesheim, M. C., Oria, M., & Yih, P. T. (Eds.) (2015). A framework for assessing effects of the food system. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK305181/. https://doi.org/10.17226/18846.
Cronon, W. (1996). Wilderness. In Uncommon ground: Rethinking the human place in nature. New York: W.W. Norton.
Education for Sustainability: Findings from the Evaluation Study of The Edible Schoolyard. (2003). A report commissioned by the Center for Ecoliteracy. http://docslide.us/documents/the-edible-schoolyard-improving-behaviour-and-academic-results.html
Emdin, C. (2010). Urban science education for the hip-hop generation. New York: Sense Publishers.
Emdin, C. (2017). For white folks who teach in the hood... and the rest of y’all too: Reality pedagogy and urban education. New York: Beacon Press.
Farm-Based Education Association Website. http://www.farmbasededucation.org/page/our-guiding-language
Foer, J. S. (2009). Eating animals. New York: Back Bay Books.
Foer, J. S. (2020). The end of meat is here. The New York Times.
Gordon, C., & Hunt, K. (2019). Reform, justice, and sovereignty: A food systems agenda for environmental communication. Environmental Communication, 13(1), 9–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2018.1435559.
Gottlieb, R., & Joshi, A. (2010). Food justice. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Joshi, A., Azuma, A., & Feenstra, G. (2008). Do farm-to-school programs make a difference? Findings and future research needs. Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition, 3(2–3).
Leopold, A. (1949). The land ethic. A sand county Almanac. http://www.waterculture.org/uploads/Leopold_TheLandEthic.pdf
Mehta, J., & Fine, S. (2019). In search of deeper learning: The quest to remake the American high school. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Milgrom, G. (2020). Recipes of my 15 grandmothers: Unique recipes and stories from the times of the Crypto-Jews during the Spanish Inquisition. New York: Gefen Publishing House.
Parkhurst, H. (1922). Education on the Dalton plan. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company.
Pollan, M. (2007). The Omnivore’s dilemma: A natural history of four meals. New York: The Penguin Press.
Pollan, M. (2013). Cooked: A natural history of transformation. New York: The Penguin Press.
Rehak, M. (2015). What was the Hip Butcher? Looking at twenty years of American eating, from Big Macs to DIY Bacon. Bookforum. http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/021_04/13922
Ritchie, H. (2020). Environmental impacts of food production. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food [Online Resource].
Ryden, K. (2011). The Handselled Globe: Natural systems, cultural process, and the formation of the new England landscape. In B. Harrison & R. W. Judd (Eds.), A landscape history of new England. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Twitty, M. (2018). The cooking gene: A journey through African American culinary history in the old South. New York: Amistad.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Slick, K., Tewell, M. (2021). Forging the Farm-To-School Connection: Articulating the Vision Behind Food-Based Environmental Education at The Dalton School. In: DeCoito, I., Patchen, A., Knobloch, N., Esters, L. (eds) Teaching and Learning in Urban Agricultural Community Contexts. Urban Agriculture. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72888-5_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72888-5_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-72887-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-72888-5
eBook Packages: Biomedical and Life SciencesBiomedical and Life Sciences (R0)