Progress 08/01/22 to 07/31/24

Outputs
Target Audience:Building on our experience developing research-based food education lessons and training educators to deliver those lessons, Pilot Light developed an Agriculture Education (AgEd) and Advocacy curriculum comprising lessons, other resources, and professional development. Our research project aimed to determine if, during the term of the grant, the resulting instruction increased student knowledge of agriculture, food, and nutrition. Beyond the end of this project, Pilot Light aims to learn from and leverage our research to scale effective food education programming for teachers and students nationwide. As is the case with all Pilot Light programs, the target audience for this project was educators interested in food education and teaching in communities where students have limited access to food education, locally grown produce, and/or information on careers in agriculture. Specifically, for this project, we targeted 6th-8th grade teachers in Chicago neighborhoods that are affected by food apartheid. Eight of the 11 participating schools are on Chicago's historically disinvested south and west sides. Over the two-year period, Pilot Light recruited, trained and supported a total of 16 Chicago Public Schools 6-8th grade teachers split across two cohorts (9 in Year 1, 7 in Year 2). Each year, a cohort of educators participated in a pre-program training to develop a peer community, learn about the Food Education Standards and the AgEd & Advocacy lessons, and receive training related to the research data collection process. Following the initial training, teachers implemented the lessons in their classrooms on a semi-structured schedule (1-2 lessons per month) and engaged in ongoing virtual professional development sessions with Pilot Light and guest speakers. All teachers received a stipend to honor their work as food education leaders and researchers. ? Between Year 1 and Year 2 of the program, Ryan Johnson, an alumnus of Pilot Light's Food Education Fellowship and middle school science teacher, edited the lessons for better science integration based on feedback from the Year 1 participants and observations from the Pilot Light team members conducting the program. The lessons for Year 2 were more in-depth with stronger alignment to NGSS standards, met all 7 Food Education Standards, have more robust optional lesson extension activities, and better prepared students with the knowledge and skills needed for their Food Advocacy Projects. One critical element that allowed this project to thrive was having multi-year funding. Because we were able to support and sustain the program through multiple rounds of implementation, it allowed us to collect feedback from teachers and iterate from Year 1 to Year 2. Another exciting outcome of the program was seeing student voice in action through the Food Advocacy Projects. By valuing our teachers' curiosity, knowledge, and expertise in implementation, we saw that spark transfer to students and extend beyond the classroom. Students explored different issues in the food system then came up with unique and local action plans for ways they could impact their communities through this inquiry-driven project. After analyzing quantitative and qualitative data from the project, the main outcomes point to knowledge growth, exposure to the topic of agriculture, increased student autonomy, and increased student comfort and ability to articulate their own choices and how those choices are impacted by factors in our food systems. Changes/Problems:The two foremost challenges experienced by teachers in the project were administrative tasks and a lack of time. Obtaining the parent/guardian consent and student assent forms required by the IRB approval associated with the research study as well as the Chicago Public School district's Research Review Board approval, added a substantial administrative burden on the teachers and created a barrier to entry for students. This delayed the start of the lessons and when the students could take the pre-program survey. Going forward, for any future grants we apply for, we will build some time into the early months of the grant period to allow for planning and training. The project also experienced some survey protocol challenges. For example, some teachers did not properly assign anonymous student identifier codes and/or provide students with detailed instructions for completing their surveys. That is, in order to anonymously share the student data and allow teachers to see how specific students grew throughout the year, we asked teachers to assign each student a number, and for the student to write their teacher's last name and their assigned number on their pre- and post-program surveys and reflection papers (i.e. "Torpy1," Torpy2," etc). Some students wrote the same number as other students, and some students only wrote their teacher's last name and not a number. While this did not impact the overall data analysis, it does impact how teachers can see the anonymized data for each student's survey responses. Teachers also mentioned struggling to find time in their already busy schedules to deliver the lessons as often as suggested since the content and activities took more instructional time than anticipated. Some of the teachers ended up breaking some lessons into multiple mini-lessons, rather than do them all in one class period and others abbreviated the lesson content. One small but important modification to address in future iterations of the lessons is to add a suggested substitute for cheese/dairy in the Raising Food lesson in addition to the included option to switch out ham for turkey to be more accessible to students with food preferences and/or restrictions. As our Program Coordinators know, another change we made to the original project design was moving away from the proposed Community Action Board (composed of teachers, parents, students, and other stakeholders) and toward a single, broader dissemination event (as described earlier in this report). What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?The 16 teachers in the project each received 10 hours of professional development from the project Co-director, Eileen Torpy (a total of 160 hours). Ms. Torpy was supported in these efforts by Pilot Light's Research and Evaluation Associate, Paulina Gomez, who filled the "Agriculture Education Manager" role as described in the Budget Narrative. ? How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?This July, Pilot Light invited 50 teachers and community partners from four states to the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences for a daylong event, "Cultivating Food Systems Leadership," where we shared the results of this research project and marked the public debut of our new AgEd and Advocacy lessons. The day began with a panel discussion on the importance of AgEd & Advocacy education featuring Nick Davis of Community Food Navigator, Marissa Dake of DNO Produce, and Pilot Light Founding Chef Matthias Merges of Folkart Management. Panelists each shared their background in food & agriculture education, underscoring the importance of advocacy in everyday lives and careers. Following the panel, attendees had the chance to experience three of the seven AgEd & Advocacy lessons for themselves in a series of hands-on demonstrations led by Pilot Light staff and our community partners. In fact, the structure of the event was designed to mimic the experiences teachers and students had via the project. Namely, it began with foundational knowledge from multiple perspectives, included opportunities for practice and investigation through hands-on activities in three breakout rooms, and, importantly, prioritized building connections to and with each other. Best practices and findings were shared at the final grant recap presentation and in a blog post by Local Food Forum who covered the event. Going forward, Pilot Light is in the process of further supporting a community of Food Education Leaders through the development of a Learning Management System (LMS) that will connect all interested teachers, share resources, and encourage collaboration. This effort is part of our commitment to the White House Challenge to End Hunger and Build Healthy Communities. An LMS vendor has been selected, and we are entering the design phase. Students also demonstrated that they shared what they learned outside of their classroom. For example, many students who focused more on cooking discussed sharing recipes with their families. Other students mentioned talking to their families about eating healthy. One teacher organized an advocacy fair at her school, during which her students presented their projects about local environmental issues to younger students. As part of our efforts to disseminate the AgEd & Advocacy lessons into more schools, Pilot Light also launched a new program called Feeding Futures. Modeled off our flagship Fellowship program for teachers, Feeding Futures is a food education and career development program that uses food as the context for delivering K-8 curriculum content across diverse subjects in Chicago, Decatur, and East St. Louis, Illinois. Three funders (one in each city) have committed to fund the program through the 2025-2026 school year. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? Nothing Reported

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Goal #1 Increase capacity for food, garden, and nutrition education in fourChicago schools by training 12 teachers to deliver a research-based Ag Ed & Advocacy curriculum in their classrooms: 16 teachers were trained to deliver the AgEd & Advocacy curriculum. At the end of the 2022-23 school year, 83% of teachers reported that nothing was limiting them from implementing agricultural educationin their classrooms, compared to 66% at the beginning of the school year. In 2023-24, this decreased from 100% to 60% from the beginning to the end of the year. Factors such as administrative burdens and time constraints presented additional challenges, as teachers explained in open-ended responses. Goal #2 Complement and build on the efforts of the USDA by leveraging the investment the USDA Farm to School program made in the development of Pilot Light'sAgEd & Advocacy curriculum and disseminating it to 336 students: Pilot Light's AgEd & Advocacy curriculum reached526 students in 11 Chicago classrooms during the two-year program. This figure is 55% higher than what was projected because several teachers in the project taught multiple grade levels/classes. Between the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years, we hired a science teacher who previously worked with Pilot Light to rewrite the lessons. The updated lessons focused on the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and WIDA language standards. Goal #3 Advance the nutritional health of children in elementaryschools by supplying a research-based Ag Ed curriculum comprising six lessons that align with Common Core, National Science, and PL Food Education Standards and supporting 144 hours of nutrition education: Despite the late start of the projectand the number of teachers who did not complete the project (see the Changes section for details), we delivered 62 hours of food education to 526 students. We received a total of 261 post-program student surveys, and the results indicated strong evidence of student knowledge gain and real-world connections through project-based learning. There was an 11% increase in students recognizing that food, fuel, and clothing all come from agriculture, and a 12% increase in students reporting that the food they eat for meals and snacks are healthy "most of the time." We also saw a 26% increase in students understanding that food, fuel, and clothing all come from agriculture, and a 6% increase in students reporting that they know or think they can eat a vegetable or fruit that is served with their school lunch. Additionally, 100 students in Year 2 of the project completed "reflection papers." In the papers, students shared a vast array of knowledge they learned in the program. Some of this was content-based such as: what foods and products come from farms, what makes foods nutritious, food safety, and how pesticides are used in food and other ecological issues. One teacher frequently integrated cooking into the lessons, so her students shared about learning cooking skills, including spicing food, using knives, and trying new foods (all of the "cooking" theme counts are from that teacher's students). Other students focused more on learning more interpersonal skills through their advocacy projects. One student explained, "I learned how to work with a group better. This helped me improve my communication skills because I'm in a group with people that will willingly listen to my ideas." The comments on group collaboration reflected both the benefits and challenges of group projects, and some students were transparent about not enjoying their group, while others noted they liked being with their friends, or feeling a sense of accomplishment about their cooperation. These reflections demonstrated developmentally appropriate learning about teamwork and relationship building. Goal #4 Foster high levels student engagement through 24 Food Advocacy Projects that honor student voice and build leadership: In the 2022-23 year, the percentage of students who reported that they worked on an advocacy project that has made a change in their community and food options grew by 22%, and in 2023-24 that grew by 19%. There was also growth in the percentage of students who said they know what advocacy means and believe they are advocates between the beginning and end of the year in both years. Some classes did one group advocacy project, and some classes had each student or small group of students do their own advocacy project. ? Student engagement was elevated through 11 Food Advocacy Projects that honored student voice and built agency and leadership. In fact, "Choice/Voice" (a theme in the Danielson pedagogy that indicates student agency and engagement) showed up throughout the reflections. Students demonstrated an understanding of how their learning enables them to have greater agency. For some students, this showed up in how they can have agency over what impacts themselves, as exhibited in this quote: "I also want to safely prepare my own food and eat healthy when I am older and right now! Other students should care where their food comes from because if they eat food that is not healthy or safe, they could get seriously sick." For others, it was about having agency to play a role in larger issues, as shown here, "It [agriculture education] is important because it teaches you how to stop agriculture problems throughout the world. Other students should care about it because it can show them how to better the world we live in." These reflections both point to the importance of students feeling empowered and encouraged to make their own decisions and play a role in their communities and also show some concern about the internalization of individual choices to address larger structural issues. Goal #5 Support the expansion of meaningful volunteer service opportunities for 12 community members to act as Advisors to student advocacy groups and help them execute their advocacy projects: Due to delays in the project start and the far-reaching locations of the participating teachers, we opted out of creating community advisory councils. Instead, we pivoted this goal by adding in student field trips for AgEd classrooms (to Green City Market and the Farm on Ogden) and by increasing the number of guest speakers at teacher PD sessions. Guest speakers, many of whom were local farmers, received stipends for their participation as outlined in the original budget (although the stipends in the budget were described as being for community advisors). In the course of this pivot, we ended up developing particularly strong partnerships with some local growers, several of whom presented at a project-end dissemination event, "Cultivating Food Systems Leadership," which included panels on agriculture education, teacher networking, and an opportunity to share the findings of this project (see section on dissemination to communities of interest for more details). Pilot Light can also share that the project's flexibility gave teachers and students autonomy to explore what food-related issues were important to them so they could take their advocacy projects in a direction that worked for their classroom, school, or community. So, in addition to building agricultural knowledge and awareness for students, multiple teachers commented on how the content and structure of these lessons gave students more agency in decision-making around food. The AgEd & Advocacy lessons exposed students to what agriculture is - including what products come from agriculture, careers in agriculture, food sourcing, trying new foods, and, for some, visits to urban farms. They also enabled knowledge transfer, as students shared what they learned with younger students and at home. One teacher explained how this transfer exists through a sharing of power, pushing students to explore inquiry-based questions in a structured way, and draw connections that they explored in their advocacy projects.

Publications

Progress 08/01/22 to 07/31/23

Outputs
Target Audience:During this reporting period, Pilot Lighttrained 16 Chicago teachers in the AgEd (Agriculture Education) & Advocacy program, increasing their capacity to deliver food, nutrition, and agricultural education. Of this group of 16, 6 completed the program, 5 are actively involved in programming in the '23-'24 school year, and 5 received initial training modules but had to remove themselves from the study for logistical challenges related to the IRB protocol. Collectively, these teachers reached approximately 150 students in grades 6-8, delivering AgEd & Advocacy lessons toincrease their food knowledge, preparation skills, and behaviors. Many of them also completed advocacy projects, engaging them in agricultural programs and careers. Changes/Problems:The barriers teachers experienced were all primarily due to the timeline of the program year. Our original timeline was postponed due to unforeseen delays in securing IRB/RRB approval of the study, so teachers started the program lessons in the middle of the school year. This proved to be difficult to the teachers especially regarding implementation of the lessons with the broader curriculum. They often felt that they could have made more connections to content in the beginning of the year and had a more seamless integration if the timeline hadn't shifted. The three-month delay in the program start date also contributed to the loss of 6 teachers from the original cohort of 12, due to inability to attend required programmatic training, and/or inability to teach the required lessons. It was often difficult for teachers to get permission slips signed and returned to them for the student leadership training. This was especially true for the research component of this study, many parents were apprehensive. resulting in low participation rates. who they are we would need to have extra barriers around confidentiality of participants in the study. In regards to student data, some consent forms were not filled out properly- boxes were not checked off even if there was a signature, and sometimes boxes were checked but no subsequent signature on the form. Because there is no identifiable information on the surveys and they are anonymous, there is nothing tying surveys to consent forms, therefore we were not sure which surveys were viable. Student data was still analyzed for internal programmatic improvements via this report, but will not be made external and cannot be used for any research presentations or publications per IRB rules. In addition, there seemed to be a knowledge gap among students regarding the definition of advocacy. Some of these students directly associated advocacy to agriculture or environment, and some owned that they didn't know or weren't sure what advocacy was. A suggestion for improvement in this would be greater depth of programming and/or support, and perhaps a lesson that focuses on advocacy specifically. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? To date, the project has provided a total of 9 professional development and training opportunities. The SY '22-'23 cohort of teachers attended 3 group professional development sessions and 2 one-on-one training sessions. The SY '23-'24 cohort of teachers has so far attended 2 group professional development sessions and 1 one-on-one training session and will have one more of each type of training before the program concludes for them in January 2024. The project has also provided a training session for the '22-'23 middle school students to engage in leadership development and advocacy project-aligned context building, another training of this style is scheduled for the '23-'24 group in November. The training Pilot Light led for the SY '22-'23 cohort was so engaging that one of our AdEd & Advocacy teachers decided to continue his food education journey by applying to Pilot Light's Fellowship program. He is a Fellow in our FY '23-'24 Fellowship cohort and had previously been involved in created Pilot Light's Food Education Standards. This indicates that teachers see the value of our approach as an enhancement to their instruction. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? The results of the first year of programming came in the form of teacher feedback, predominantly about the curriculum and lesson resources. Adjustments and additions were made to the curriculum and it was redistributed to the original cohort of teachers, as well as the new cohort of teachers. Results from the pilot year were also shared with Pilot Light staff, Board of Directors, and teachers in Pilot Light's other programs (Fellowship, SnackTime Explorers). As a result of this outreach, one of the teachers in Pilot Light's SY '22-'23 Fellowship cohort elected to sign up for the AgEd & Advocacy program is SY '23-'24. Upon conclusion of the active programming in January '24 wherein the project moves more fully and formally into its evaluation stage, the results of the project will be shared with schools, community partners, families involved in the projects, and of course, the USDA. The materials used during the programs will be made more broadly available through Pilot Light's online lesson library, the Food Education Center.? What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? We will complete programming with the second cohort of teachers and support the success of student advocacy projects, lead additional training sessions (as seen above), make additional programmatic and curriculum changes to reflect the experiences of teachers and students in the pilot iteration of programming, and engage experts around evaluation and next steps of the program. We will also be more vigilant in ensuring consent forms are understood and filled out correctly at the time of signing. In addition, we will ensure that participating teachers understand that students who do not receive consent will still take part in the program lessons, but we will not collect any data from them.?

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? During implementation so far, we have trained 16 teachers in the AgEd (Agriculture Education) & Advocacy program. Of this group of 16, 6 have completed the program, 5 are actively involved in programming in the '23-'24 school year, and 5 received initial training modules but had to remove themselves from the study for logistical challenges related to the IRB protocol. (goal 1) Knowledge of agriculture, food, and nutrition increased for students in grades 6-8. Most notable results include significant (10%+) increases in awareness of the types of agricultural products farms produce (fuel, food, clothing, or all of the above) and factors that affect where tomatoes can be grown (temperature, soil type, water access, or all of the above). The AgEd & Advocacy lessons were expanded to include a formalized advocacy project lesson, and after one cycle of implementation, the 6 original lessons were rewritten and became a set of 7 to incorporate teacher feedback and better align to Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) for integration into middle school science classrooms. The revised lessons created additional hands-on activities and increased opportunities for food to be used more often during classroom implementation of the curriculum. In response to teacher feedback who felt that focusing their classrooms around one advocacy project for greater impact, compared to the original two projects per classroom scoped in the grant, we adjusted the format. To date, 6 out of the revised 11 anticipated projects have been completed. For many teachers, these projects were an area of professional growth. Within education, many organizations tout the language of centering student voice while still holding adult-centered benchmarks that teachers are used to having to bridge. Through this program, Pilot Light continuously reiterated the importance of students generating their own interpretations and definitions of advocacy then acting on them in ways they found to be meaningful. The results allowed for a wide variety of projects from classroom to classroom, and for curiosity-driven projects that focused on issues and solutions that students found meaningful for their own communities. Pilot Light partnered with local farmers (see below) on the development of videos that accompanied the lessons. The majority of participating teachers said they really liked the videos, their students enjoyed them, and that they would love to have had more videos and/or more time to plan the lessons or have more content so that they could 'delve deeper' into the agriculture material with students. In lieu of volunteer opportunities which presented logistical challenges and administrative burden for teachers, Pilot Light instead engaged community partners in the agriculture spaces emphasizing voices from BIPOC-led organizations and supporting the expansion of their work through speaking honorariums. These experts provided content expertise in agriculture and living examples of advocacy through their work to students and teachers. Pilot Light partnered with Daviid Toledo of The Contemporary Farmer, Inc., British Griffis of Harvest OG, Chef Jessica Walks First of Ketapanen Kitchen, and other local Chicago-based partners. This program also served as a meaningful conduit for teachers in the AgEd & Advocacy program and their CPS resources through the Office of Student Health and Wellness around garden-based initiatives and resources.?

Publications