Year 10 food exhibition

Later this week our year 10 students are putting on their exhibition. Most have some good ideas and most have worked really hard on it. I am worried that we have let them down a bit though. The exhibition isn't based on any kind of real world problem. Individual displays might be but the exhibition isn't really encouraging a "community of learners" across the whole class. The name of the exhibition is "Eat me! The controversy of food" which the students came up with. They have had to define an area using the context of food and develop some questions which their display answers, and which fits into the title of the exhibition. But it will mostly be a collection of individual or group displays rather than a collective attempt to try and inform visitors about a genuine real life problem.

This came to my attention with one particular student who chose to do religion and food. She has done some fantastic research on three world religions and shown what their beliefs are about certain foods. But there was a real element of So What? With her topic. She said that what seemed to pull all of them together was that the reason they didn't eat certain foods was because of beliefs of compassion and mutual respect. Taking this idea we talked about the heading for her display being "Is religion all bad?" laid over a whole bunch of photographs of religious conflict. She will have an opening statement explaining that in fact religions also promote peace and her way of doing that will be through their beliefs about food.

My worry is that we have let her and others down a bit. The "food" part is in one sense too restricting and in another sense allowing too many tangent exhibition displays that are not about real world issues. It is that old complexity thinking concept of "enabling constraints" again. We didn't quite hit it. What we need to do next time is decide from the beginning what the real world question is. Teachers use their subjects as vehicles for exploring, developing, engaging with that question some more. Then students brainnstorm what action they could take to solve that problem at a level manageable to them. The exhibition, then, is not the purpose or final product of the unit. It is a by product, an opportuinty for students to celebrate and share with their parents about their learning and how they attempted to solve a piece of the problem. This attempt to solve the problem is the more important part. That is when they are Participating and Contributing as the key competencies call for.

Anyway, I'm sure they will come up with something great on Thursday, notwithstanding the limitations I am afraid we have imposed on them. But next time it will be even better.