Colorado Academy seventh grade students recently put their classroom learning into action when they participated in a food justice activist panel at GrowHaus, an urban farm in northeast Denver. The panel included neighborhood students and farmers from a local Microfarm.

 

The lesson was part of the Outside the Box class, which requires students to work through challenges to teach and practice CA’s 6Cs of character, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and cultural competence.

 

It was the second of three visits to GrowHaus, which is located in a food desert. On the first visit, students toured the neighborhood and discussed different factors that can arise from a lack of a sustainable food source.

 

“Lacking access to food is a symptom of a larger problem,” says Outside the Box teacher Forbes Cone. “It causes malnutrition and can be emblematic of larger structural issues.”

 

Taught across the continuum of subjects in seventh grade, the food justice lesson sees students examining food yield in math class, as well as the nutritional value of crops versus manufactured foods in science class. On their third and last visit to Growhaus students will meet with community members and help to prepare their gardens for the spring.

 

The Outside the Box class culminates with a final project where students research the different social issues they’ve studied throughout the year, and then design a way to take action.

 

“What we’re trying to do is get students to think more systematically about how we can create more justice in our society and how everything is interconnected,” says Cone.