Why Chefs Without Borders?
Using Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development, our lessons were planned so as to scaffold the students with enough beginning knowledge to provide discussion via critical thinking. In addition to Vygotsky’s theory, we also considered the School Bus Metaphor presented during the semester. In order to plan this unit, we needed to decide where our students were located initially, determine the destination at which they were arriving to, and the means of transportation along the way. After deciding the target languages and skill sets, we formulated our lesson plans to follow the Common European Framework of Reference template of “can-do” statements. We designed the content and activities to have specific lesson objectives that correspond with the competences stated in the overall unit objectives. In order to understand if our students are properly arriving to the designation of knowledge, we designed simple, formative assessments throughout the unit. These assessments included: quick-writes, exit slips, and short discussions. As Hymes said, language is a socially constructed phenomenon (1971). We created our lesson plans to reflect this idea in that we will offer students the opportunity to communicate with peers in authentic, meaningful, and purposeful interactions with little assistance from their teacher.
Project rationale/ Introduction: Why cooking projects in schools?
Did you know that many teenagers do not know how to cook? This conclusion was drawn in a recent research that examined the cooking power or lack of cooking power among teenagers. This statement can seem quite trivial, but it should not when it is prone to carrying other food-related issues such as obesity, for example. Obesity is a health problem concerning a vast part of the population around the world. In the UK, a total of 61.4% adults are either overweight or obese and, while in Spain the numbers considerably deplete, with a 23.8% of the adult population being obese in 2016,the obesity rates in Spain have doubled in the last 20 years leading to more than 53% of the whole population (including children) being beyond their adequate weight. In the UK, among year 6 children (aged 10-11), 20.0% of them are obese and 14.3% overweight while in Spain, the childhood obesity rate is in the region of 40%
Facing this alarming situation, it is worth taking a closer look the causes of such high figures. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one of the main causes of obesity is the global dietetic change towards the increase of hypercaloric aliments with high amounts of fats and sugars. Also, it states that obesity is, apart from a health problem caused by a non-healthy diet and lack of physical activity, a social one that concerns other areas such as economics, politics and education. According to these statements, it seems more than adequate for us to start acting from schools, by creating a food-related project, in order to increase awareness of food knowledge and the importance of eating healthy, while students discover how cooking can actually help to promote this awareness. In this same line, it is important to ask, why cooking in schools?
For all these reasons, One4All considers that creating a Telecollaborative Language Learning Cooking-related project in schools from Spain and the UK is a perfect way of increasing food awareness in order to contribute to a healthier diet