What's your comfort food?
toolkit to promote civic competence
A free educational toolkit.
What's your comfort food? is a free, educational toolkit developed for use in libraries, schools, and museums. Targeting teens from 6th-8th grade, the topic of comfort foods is used as a gateway for deeper discussions to help youth develop empathy for and navigate interactions with different perspectives than their own. Developed in accordance with Ohio's Learning Standards for Social Studies, the toolkit can also be easily integrated into curriculum, suggestions on how to do this are included in the toolkit.
The toolkit contains coloring sheets that ask visitors to share their comfort food, a book that compiles worksheets into a community cookbook, 25 take-home recipe cards, and a collection of curriculum guidelines for educators on how to integrate the toolkit into 6th-8th grade classroom discussions.
Disciplines
Design research, graphic design, experience design, education
Collaborators
Dr. Elizabeth Sanders, William Nickley
Informed by ohio Librarians.
School districts carry a heavy burden to provide support to students and their families. When pressed for funding and resources, districts tend to favor extracurricular support in mathematics and hard sciences while extracurricular support for the humanities is the first to be eliminated. In our complex modern world, students need skills in the hard sciences, but not at the expense of the skills developed through the humanities.
So where can students go to receive extracurricular support while developing their skills in social studies if opportunities are not provided through schools? Local libraries are uniquely situated to help address this gap. As established community centers, libraries are places of social connectedness, conversation, and education in various forms and often take on the role of extracurricular educators in skills related to civic competency.
This toolkit was developed with the help of rural librarians across Ohio, where extracurricular funding for the humanities is particularly limited.
To request a free toolkit, click here.