Engaging parents in food education

When you think about engaging with parents, you need to understand what the difference between involvement and engagement are. Larry Ferlazzo created a very easy-to-understand definition: if you aim for parental involvement you lead with your mouth, telling parents what is expected of them. When you want to engage them, you lead with your ears, listening to their questions, concerns and fear.

Leading with your ears is more important in food education that in many other domains. In a recent series of co-creation workshops used in research of the BIO-STREAMS Horizon Europe project, children and parents expressed a clear wish for school to stay out of food-related education. In a workshop with school leaders the importance of parents being fully engaged in food education was also clearly stated as the only solution. The role of school in this, according to both groups, is offering a healthy choice of school meals besides their traditional options making it possible for students to choose freely. However, as concerned professionals, you want to win them for your food-related lessons.

You need to start from here: parents play a special role in the lives of their children. When we refer to parents in this article, we mean any person who has the legal responsibility for a child, be it a biological or adoptive parent or a guardian. However, parenting a child usually does not solely lie with the legally responsible “parent”. Spouses of parents with no legal role, older siblings, grandparents and other family members, even au pairs or neighbours nearly always play a co-parenting role and co-educate children. For this reason, we consider parents and the broader family with a co-parenting, co-educator role when parental engagement is discussed.

It is important to note that all parents want the best for their children, even if their idea of what is best is not in line with your position. Some parents need more help from trusted professionals to deliver on this wish. To be able to support them, the first step is to build trust. It is important to be aware that for some parents a teacher might be a figure of authority or someone they are afraid of, possibly based on their own schooling experiences. Parents are the first and most important equal partners for school professionals in educating a child.

There are important, pedagogical and psychological reasons why we have decided to highlight the importance of parental engagement. Research shows that parents and family have a far bigger impact on the learning of a child than the school in all areas (while there is also a major impact by peers from about age 11). This is especially true for food where the amount of time children spend on learning from family is unquestionably more than that spent at school. Thus, school and teachers, with much less impact, would ideally work in closer partnership to help their children at this possibly precarious age. They need to team up with parents to have the support of the home for the cause. For your new programme to be successful, parents need to know about what is being taught, to be interested in what their children do, and to be supportive and not obstructive. For potential success and benefit for all parties, parents must be invited into the conversation to support, rather than obstruct, the educational efforts of professionals.

The key principle is that schools must not educate children against their families. Thus, introducing a topic like food education needs to be aligned with the practices and values of the families of your students. For example, if local tradition or the traditions of a certain minority group are not particularly planet friendly or considered healthy, it would not be beneficial to approach the programme highlighting what the local community is doing wrong. Alternatively, it would be more advantageous to open the conversation on a positive note, by inviting families to discuss how they feel their practices could be improved, what they are comfortable experimenting with after introducing the concepts of your food education programme to them. Leaving the parents out or trying to educate them by sending messages home via their children can easily become highly counterproductive to the work done at school and it can also lead to mixed messages by trusted adults for a child.

Food education is an area where traditionally disadvantaged or less engaged parents can be put in the limelight. Many migrant groups in Europe have far healthier food traditions that the receiving countries. In many countries, cooking “classes” by migrant parents have proven to be so much empowering that it had a positive impact on the engagement of the same parents with school in general.

What teachers need to consider for this is that most parents only have one schooling example: their own personal lived experiences. They may demand (some loudly) that the Pythagorean theorem or the Napoleonic wars are taught, because that is what is important to them according to their personal experience. However, school professionals must convince parents that food education also has a place in school. Similarly, methods (especially if you are using student-centred methodologies) need to be introduced or explained to parents in advance. They may not understand without explanation what kind of learning is happening when children are doing food education activities. The format of the discussion should be carefully chosen to be inclusive. Sending a letter home or inviting parents to a frontal presentation are not suitable. In an ideal situation, there are multiple opportunities and channels open for communication, and parents have the opportunity to ask questions and also contribute to the shaping of the local programme. They should be welcome to participate as learners or educators, building on their desire to learn and/or expertise – that may well exceed that of a teacher – as the programmes to reach their full potential, are ideally community-based.

Parental engagement step-by-step

For different types of activities that you can do with students of different ages, check out the “Missing Link” (p. 33-38) created for the BioBeo Horizon Europe project. https://library.parenthelp.eu/missing-link-bioeconomy-manual-biobeo/

(This article was created by The Kitchen Adventure team)