Food, Food Systems, and Culture Collection UA4.6.8 - Special Collections & University Archives

Summary Information
Historical Information
Scope and Contents
Arrangement note
Administrative Information
Collection Inventory

Summary Information

Repository: UNC Asheville Special Collections and University Archives
Title: Food, Food Systems, and Culture Collection
ID: UA 4.6.8
Date [inclusive]: 1986-2016
Extent: Virtual collection.
Description note: This collection contains documents, research, and other materials created by faculty and students from 2008-2016 in the Food, Food Systems, and Food Culture Interdisciplinary Cluster at the UNC Asheville.
Location note: The collection consists of digital files. Access is through the links below.
Language: English
Abstract: abstract

Citation

[Identification of item], Food, Food Systems, and Culture Collection, D.H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, University of North Carolina Asheville

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Historical Information

The origins of the Food, Food Systems, and Culture Certificate began in 2006 when Dr. Sally Wasileski (Chemistry) and Dr. Karin Peterson (Sociology) attended the SENCER Summer Institute. Upon returning to campus they contacted Dr. Amy Lanou (Health and Wellness) and Dr. Leah Greden Mathews (Economics) to discuss an idea they hatched: a cross-disciplinary lens with which undergraduate students could study food. These four faculty members submitted and received a SENCER SALG grant (2006) to develop a “cluster” of courses, cross-course activities and assessment of student learning in the courses. The group’s proposal to UNC Asheville’s Integrative Liberal Studies Oversight Committee for the Food for Thought Cluster of courses was approved in spring 2007, followed by an Integrative Liberal Studies Cluster Development Grant in Summer 2007 to clarify the goals and how they would be achieved. They gathered at Dr. Wasileski’s home for a day-long workshop to conduct this work and began offering classes in the “Food for Thought” Cluster in Fall 2007.

2008 brought expansion to the number of faculty and disciplines directly teaching in the Food for Thought cluster. Dr. David Clarke (Biology) joined what was then referred to as the “Food Cluster” and began offering BIO 110 Plants and Humans as a cluster offering in Spring 2008.

One of the priorities for the Food for Thought Cluster faculty was to ensure high impact practices were woven into the fabric of class engagements. An early hallmark of the Food Cluster was a set of cross-course projects including the Harvest Bounty Shared Meal (HBSM) which was held in 2007 and 2008. The HBSM in 2008 featured 100 students from 6 cluster courses and 20 guests from across the campus and the broader Asheville community.

Other cross-class projects were similarly impactful. These included two rounds of Dietary Guidelines for the UNC Asheville campus in 2008 (engaging students in Nutrition + Food Politics + Food of Chemistry + Society & Technology + Land Economics courses) and 2009 (Land Economics + Food of Chemistry + Food Politics). These projects led to significant changes to Campus Dining policies for food purchasing and labeling that have largely been in place since that time. Other cross class projects include Understanding Food Commodities Policy Project (Economics of Food + Food of Chemistry + Food Politics & Nutrition Policy courses; 2010), Nutrition Sources: Truth in Labeling Project (Food of Chemistry + Nutrition; 2011), Latino Contributions to the Food System (Food Politics + Spanish II; 2011), Gendered Health: Sugars & Artificial Sweeteners (Pathophysiology + Sociology of Gender; 2011), and a Festival of Dionysus in the Mountain South–Meal and Poster Demonstrations on Cultural Perspectives of Plants and Healing Traditions (Plants & Humans + Pathophysiology + Foodways of Blue Zones; 2014). In several years, Food Cluster-specific poster sessions were held as part of UNC Asheville’s Undergraduate Research Symposium. The poster sessions were judged by community members including local farmers, members of food-related organizations, and others; in one year (2008), winning posters were displayed at the North Asheville Tailgate Market as a means of ensuring learning and impact in the broader Asheville community.

Assessment of student learning was built into the Food for Thought cluster of courses and cross-class engagements from the very beginning. Because the work began with a SENCER grant, the first years of the cluster’s assessment was necessarily conducted using a modified version of the SENCER SALG instrument. The group identified the SENCER SALG as a less-than-ideal fit since it was designed for use in individual natural science courses and thus not well-suited to assess cross-class engagements or the use of alternative pedagogies such as cross-class projects. This led to both intense reflection and additional internal (UNCA-funded) summer grant opportunities to improve on the assessments that were being conducted. In addition, this work led to several conference and invited campus presentations at local, regional, and national venues as well as three publications. The first paper demonstrated significant and positive perceptions of learning among students in the Cluster (Wingert et al, 2011) while the second paper provided evidence of significant and positive learning gains from student engagement in the cluster relative to students without cross-class engagements (Wingert et al, 2014). A third paper (Wasileski et al, 2016) described the challenges and benefits of ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration and other insights gained from several years of working together.

The Food for Thought Cluster, as it was then known, gained national recognition for its innovative pedagogies and curricular contributions. Among these recognitions were inclusion as a National Science Foundation’s Science Education for New Civic Engagements (SENCER) Model in 2008 (“Food for Thought: Engaging the Citizen in the Science and Politics of Food Information, Food Consumerism, Nutrition and Health: An Integrative Liberal Studies Topical Cluster”). In addition, the Food for Thought Cluster of faculty was awarded the William E. Bennett Award for Extraordinary Contributions to Citizen Science by the National Center for Science and Civic Engagement in 2013.

Just as the impetus for the Food for Thought cluster of courses began with innovations to the University’s general education curriculum–specifically, the adoption of the Integrative Liberal Studies Program (ILS) in 2004–so too was the Food Cluster officially sunsetted when UNCA eliminated the ILS course cluster concept with a subsequent general education revision in 2014.

With concrete evidence of student learning gains from cluster engagements, the faculty teaching in the cluster–at that point numbering seven faculty from six departments–were not willing to abandon their cross-, multi-, and interdisciplinary teaching and learning activities. They wrote documents to enable UNCA undergraduate students who wished to complete a voluntary cluster-like assemblage of courses to do so with a transcript mark indicating their accomplishment. Despite initial resistance, the curricular innovation championed by the Food Cluster faculty, the interdisciplinary certificate program, was approved by the Faculty Senate in May 2016.

The Food, Food Systems, and Culture Certificate began in Fall 2016 with offerings that looked strikingly similar to those in the original Food for Thought cluster. To complete the Certificate in Food, Food Systems, and Culture, students are required to enroll in a minimum of 4 courses and 12 hours of food-centered and food-related coursework and complete a course project that engages one or more high impact practices such as undergraduate research, a cross-class project, or other intentionally interdisciplinary activity.

While engaging in these significant curricular engagements, students and faculty both in and outside the cluster and follow-on certificate program have been engaging in teaching, research and community based projects related to food, food systems, and culture. This archive includes artifacts from class-based projects, cross-class projects, undergraduate research, faculty research, and community-engaged scholarship projects that relate to food and food systems. Additional accruals are expected as teaching and learning about food, food systems, and culture is ongoing at UNC Asheville.

– Contributed by Leah Matthews

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Scope and Contents

This collection contains documents, research, and other materials created by faculty and students from 2012-2016 in the Food, Food Systems, and Food Culture Interdisciplinary Cluster at the UNC Asheville. This interdisciplinary cluster is described in the 2016-17 UNC Catalog:

Interdisciplinary Cluster in Food, Food Systems and Culture:

Participating faculty and departments: Amy Lanou (Coordinator) (Health and Wellness); David Clarke (Biology); Leah Mathews (Economics); Kevin Moorhead (Environmental Studies); Karin Peterson (Sociology and Anthropology); Sally Wasileski (Chemistry); Jason Wingert (Health and Wellness)
The Interdisciplinary Cluster in Food, Food Systems and Culture focuses on developing the student as an informed consumer of food by providing a platform for discussion of what we eat, why we eat, where our food comes from and its journey from production to consumption, and how food affects our bodies, health and lives.
The Food, Food Systems and Culture Cluster requires the completion of a minimum of 4 courses and 12 semester hours as follows. All courses used for the cluster must be completed at UNC Asheville.
At least one course must be chosen from the listing of Food-focused courses. Food-focused courses have food, food systems or food culture as a central theme and consistently offer students an intentionally interdisciplinary experience (e.g. cross-course project or other high impact pedagogical practice). The remaining three or more courses may be chosen from Food-focused or Food-related courses, following the distribution guidelines required of all interdisciplinary clusters. Other courses may be substituted with approval of the cluster coordinator.

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Arrangement note

This collection contains digital files located in Special Collections. LInks are provided to access files. Some additional files for the Food, Food Systems, and Cultures Collection, including scanned notebooks used by student researchers, presentations in various online formats (Prezi, etc.), and other files are available in Special Collections. Please ask the Special Collections staff for assistance or more information.

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