“It was a much better year in terms of social-emotional learning and engaging and connecting with my students and parents,” says CPS teacher Brenda Armstrong, who used a food education program called pilotlightchefs in her classroom.
Bringing food and cooking demonstrations is just one part of food education, according to Pilot Light's executive director Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn. Image: Eddie Quinones / The University of Chicago
“In some schools you go in and they have a teacher devoted to maybe sustainability or food. But in other schools, they don’t,” DeSorbo-Quinn explains. “It really begs the question, for something so important that we do multiple times a day—we're humans; we eat—why aren't we learning about it in school on a regular basis?”
Armstrong became a Food Education Fellow with Pilot Light in 2020. Her mother and grandmother were both teachers, but Armstrong never planned to follow them into the profession. Nevertheless, after 29 years, she still loves it. She’s currently working as an interventionist at Parker Community Academy in Englewood, but was a teacher at Oglesby Elementary School in Auburn Gresham for the previous nine years. It was at Ogelsby that she spent her year as a Pilot Light fellow.
“We were able to talk about farming, we were able to relate it back to [labor activist] Cesar Chavez,” Armstrong says.One of Armstrong’s favorite Pilot Light lessons came while remote teaching during the earlier days of the COVID-19 pandemic with her third graders. It began with a simple “All About Me” exercise, in which she asked students to share facts about themselves using granola mix. Students had to add ingredients that described them in some way.
As in those lunchtime interruptions where kids would show off their snacks, food is a topic that often naturally came up in Armstrong’s classroom. A bag of chips, Armstrong says, can be a quick lesson in math—how many calories per serving? That connection is what Armstrong found so useful. Much of the time, she says, she’s a very busy teacher, and it’s hard to find time to stop and really listen to her students or engage with them if they walk up and start a conversation. But when food came up, it was a different story.
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