Connecting Undergraduates and Adolescents through Food Literacy: Development of a Cross-age Teaching, Service-Learning Internship

Abstract

Undergraduate students (n=15) from two universities attended a three-day workshop in Year 1 of the program on learner-centered, experiential education and inquiry-based facilitation strategies.Undergraduates engaged in experiential professional development by observing and facilitating lessons from the learner-centered curriculum Teens CAN: Comprehensive Food Literacy in Cooking, Agriculture, and Nutrition (L. D. Ruiz et al., 2021). Undergraduates participated in a two-tiered, cross-age teaching service-learning project (SLP) to deliver food literacy education to adolescents in two school districts in California. Results indicate that fidelity for all lesson components exceeded the 80% threshold associated with measurable student outcomes. Average fidelity of lesson implementation was 96%. Furthermore, the five lesson observers had high agreement with an inter-rater reliability of 0.94. After the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the project pivoted virtually. Utilizing the lesson study design of professional development, undergraduate participants (n=12) from two universities participated in a yearlong servicelearning project to develop online enhancements for the Teens CAN curriculum. Undergraduate participants self-reported that the SLP improved their confidence in professional collaboration and communication. Participants self-reported that they applied their improved skills in communication, collaboration, and feedback into their other courses, and that the SLP was a novel experience that prepared them for job acquisition post-graduation. v