Increasing organic consumption by school meals – lessons learned in the iPOPY project

Increasingly, food consumption occurs in out-of-home contexts, where organic food can also have a role to play. Public food services may be utilised to increase the sustainability of providing nutrition. Although school meals may be well suited to integrating organic food and sustainable nutrition concepts, school food provision systems are very different across Europe. This paper compares school food provision systems and their utilisation of organic food in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy and Norway, discussing how various strategies and instruments used for organic food procurement in school meals may increase organic food consumption. Using five analytical categories—(a) type of school food service, (b) degree of public financing, (c) degree of political and administrative involvement in school food procurement in general, (d) degree of specific support for organic school food, and (e) availability of organic food supply adapted to school food service— values have been assessed for each country in order to summarise and visually display their differences. Especially, the degree of specific support for organic school food shows a significant relation to the actual use of organic food in school meals. To maximise the share of organic food in school meals, instruments should be adapted to the actual points of departure in each case. It is argued that strategies and instruments designed to promote public procurement of organic food increase the consumption of organic food in schools and that such policies will have the greatest impact when they are linked up with broader concepts such as a whole-school approach and sustainable nutrition

Comparing teacher roles in Denmark and England

This article reports the findings of a comparative study of teaching in Denmark and England; its broader aim is to help develop an approach for comparing pedagogy. Lesson observations and interviews identified the range of goals towards which teachers in each country worked and the actions these prompted. These were clustered using the lens of Bernstein’s pedagogic discourse (1990; 1996) to construct teacher roles which provided a view of pedagogy. Through this approach we have begun to identify variations in pedagogy across two countries. All teachers in this study adopted a variety of roles; of significance was the ease with which competent English teachers moved between roles. The English teachers observed adopted roles consistent with a wider techno-rationalist discourse. There was a greater subject emphasis by Danish teachers whose work was set predominantly within a democratic humanist discourse, whilst the English teachers placed a greater emphasis on applied skills

How can the concepts of habitus and field help us to understand the engagement of educational workers in higher Education?

In ‘Making a European area of lifelong learning a reality’, the EU stressed the role of universities in relation to lifelong learning, a role that entails a need for widening access to universities, particularly for those not coming through the traditional direct route of upper secondary education. As teachers play a significant role in the quality of the lifelong learning as well as in motivating future generations to take part in lifelong learning, education and training for teachers becomes important; not only in relation to initial teacher education, but also in relation to a continuous development of knowledge and skills. This paper represents the first stage of a larger comparative project intended to examine and compare educational workers’ (i.e. professionals involved in teaching in the class room) participation in higher education in England and Denmark, their access and interest. In particular, the paper relates participation and engagement to national and international educational policies and frames this work within an examination of the social background of the professional groups. The key research questions at this stage of the work are methodological and can be summed up by the overarching question, “How can the concepts of habitus and field help us to understand levels of engagement of educational workers in Higher Education”? The paper reports the results of our review of current policies and our efforts to identify the structural relations within the educational professional fields in each country. To do so we are developing a theoretical model using the relational analytical approach advocated by Bourdieu. As such, our work is an early stage attempt at operationalising Bourdieu’s observations regarding the dynamics of field. This seems to us to provide an important conceptual approach to understanding the habitus of educational workers in the context of the dynamics of a fast changing policy arena and the complexities of the backgrounds of individuals working in the educational field. The model attempts to build in the reflexivity that Bourdieu demands for a ‘science’ that is not weakened by over-emphasis on either the objective structural relations or the subjective phenomenology of experience. Thus, the paper presents a preliminary contextual analysis of the factors that enable an understanding of engagement or lack of engagement in higher level learning among school-based education workers in the two EU countries and is related to a larger research project that explores habitus (both individual and collective) among these groups of education workers

Organic and conventional public food procurement for youth in Denmark – a national overview

This report is a mapping of the activities within public procurement of organic food for youth in Denmark, with a special focus on school meals. In Denmark, it is voluntary whether local municipalities or schools arrange school meals or not. Over time, more and more schools or municipalities choose to establish school meal systems, but these vary extensively in the way they are organized, what kind of food is served, and how they are financed. This report includes an overall mapping of the different ways of organizing school meals and their dissemination. Organic food has also been increasingly debated in relation to public procurement for children and youth. Whether the subject of organic food is discussed and implemented depends on the local values, goals, resources and politics. Hence there are municipalities and institutions with no organic food at all, while others have an organic share of more than 90 %. This is particularly in the municipalities situated in the Greater Copenhagen area, and the Green cities cooperation. These cases are briefly described in the report, along with a short mapping of other municipalities using organic food in meals for daycare institutions or schools. The report was produced in the iPOPY project, “innovative Public Organic food Procurement for Youth”. Similar reports have been produced for the other iPOPY countries; Norway, Finland and Italy

Organic Food for Youth in Public Settings: Potentials and Challenges. Preliminary Recommendations from a European Study

This report contains presentations from the four explorative work packages in iPOPY. The iPOPY project – innovative Public Organic food Procurement for Youth – is one of eight transnational research programs initiated by the 11 European countries participating in the CORE Organic I funding body network. iPOPY aims at increasing the consumption of organic food among young people, especially in school meal settings but also elsewhere, e.g. at music festivals. We work towards this goal by studying how organic food as well as the organic concept in general has been introduced in public food serving settings in various countries, and what may be the most promising approaches. Italy, Finland, Denmark, Norway and Germany are the countries being studied. The iPOPY work packages explore policy issues, supply chain organization and the impact of certification, the users’ perceptions and participation in the food system, and the health impacts of organic food implementation. By June 2010, iPOPY will be completed. Hence, this report is linked to the last iPOPY seminar arranged during the BioFach Trade Fair in Nuremberg, Germany. We arranged similar seminars also in 2008 and 2009. These seminars presented the situation with respect to organic school meals in many different European countries (2008) and in more detail in iPOPY countries as well as some relevant cases (2009). Proceedings are available from the 2009 seminar (Nölting et al 2009), and all presentations from the 2008 seminar are found on the iPOPY website, www.ipopy.coreportal.org. In the seminar in 2010, we will draw a link from iPOPY results to the municipality of Nuremberg, which has ambitious aims as to becoming an Organic Model City (BioModellstadt). This includes far reaching goals for the share of organic and regional food served in public schools and kindergartens. Further, the project results will be linked to the general situation for school meals in Europe. For this presentation, no written paper is available, but we will present the slides on the website. From the project we present preliminary recommendations and conclusions from the four explorative work packages

Constellations of public organic food procurement for youth. An interdisciplinary analytical tool

The research project “innovative Public Organic food Procurement for Youth” (iPOPY) combines a multitude of national and disciplinary perspectives: a necessary condition for a holistic understanding of public organic food procurement for youth (POPY). One challenge of such a research agenda lies in the integration of diverse results. This calls for an interdisciplinary research approach that facilitates discussion about results generated in different work packages (WP). This report sketches the methodological tool constellation analysis, one of the basic assumptions of which is that technical, natural and social elements and developments are closely intertwined and can only be analysed by taking into account their heterogeneity. Constellation analysis may serve as a bridging concept for the integration and synthesis of project results, which is a task of WP 1. This report presents preliminary results from an explorative constellation analysis of (organic) school meals. In the appendix, a list of definitions with regard to POPY is provided – the iPOPY glossary, which may later be further developed and published separately