By Caroline Croland
Fall is in the air, and Georgia Organics is excited to kick off our October Farm to School month by talking to a seasoned farm to school advocate and expert educator about how to engage kids around eating healthy foods.
Jenna Mobley is truly a farm to school rock star, and we’re so grateful for her work educating and engaging with young Georgians around healthy, local food.
Jenna Mobley and student. Photos courtesy of Jenna Mobley.
“Farm to School Month is all about creating access points for educators that maybe don't see themselves as having a green thumb or have never taught in a classroom. People tend to worry that they don’t have enough experience with gardening, or don't know how to cook—all of that is okay! All of this work is accessible to everyone at all experience levels and interest levels,” says Mobley.
Jenna received the Presidential Innovation Award for Educators from President Barack Obama in 2015. She began her career in education in 2008 and has since become a leading provider and advocate of increasing educational resources in the areas of social justice, food access, and environmental education.
As a grade-school teacher, Mobley was struck by what a powerful tool food could be in the classroom and what a profound impact being in the garden had on her students. The passion and excitement she observed in her students around activities was undeniable.
“I could just tell that this was the sort of context where the kids were genuinely curious, engaged, and excited about the academic concept that we were learning,” said Mobley.
Georgia Organics is lucky enough to have Jenna as one of our teacher trainers.
“Jenna Mobley is the teacher we all wish we had as a kid, and the one who truly gets us as adults. She's a fantastic teacher of all age groups and helps our farm to school team train educators across the state of Georgia. Jenna brings lessons to life; whether she's cutting fruits into fractions, turning taste tests into theme paper topics, or simply sharing her love of growing gardens. We are thrilled to have her on our Georgia Organics Farm to School team,” says Kimberly Della Donna, the Farm to School Director at Georgia Organics.
We sat down with Jenna over Zoom to talk about what drives her work, her journey with Farm to School, tips on how to get kids excited about eating healthy…and alien spaceships in the garden.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and what drew you to your work in education and food access?
Absolutely! I have been a public school teacher for 12 years. I worked primarily in Atlanta Public Schools as a first-grade teacher, second-grade teacher, and then a fourth-grade teacher.
I currently work as the Education Director for Community Farmer's Markets, and I am also a teacher trainer for Captain Planet Foundation, Life Lab, FoodCorp, and Georgia Organics.
The first unit to inspire me in this work was a Johnny Appleseed unit that I was teaching to my first-grade class. I quickly realized that food was the one thing that every single one of my kids could get excited about, every single one of my kids regardless of background or their prior knowledge all got excited about eating together.
First grade standards also include George Washington Carver, so we followed that up with a lesson on growing sweet potatoes, which we planted in May. Then when they came back as second graders we would go back out there and harvest them. It was truly such a light bulb moment because every child absolutely loved being outside, loved being in the fresh air.
I could just tell that this was the sort of context where the kids were genuinely curious, engaged, and excited about the academic concept that we were learning. They also had a lot fewer behavior problems. Not only because the kids were excited, but also because they were getting a chance to move their bodies and practice their fine motor and gross motor skills. I was excited to see them eating better off the cafeteria line. There were just these amazing outcomes that came into play. It was also an opportunity to get the parents more involved—we formed a Wednesday group where all the grandparents came to weed up the garden with us on Wednesday.
Teaching through food brought about all these amazing things within my little 28 kids in my classroom year after year after year, so I kept growing with it. My passion for the work grew over the years, and eventually, President Obama awarded me the Presidential Innovation Award for Educators in 2015. That’s when I started doing teacher training all over the country and began focusing my work more on curriculum development. It was a real big shift when our president at the time took the effort to acknowledge one little teacher in her one little sphere, and now I feel like the work has been able to reach a lot more people.
With all of the upheaval in education created by the COVID-19 pandemic, what does the future of Farm to School education access look like?
There are a couple of big things that have changed. One thing is that a lot of this experiential sensory learning used to happen at schools and with teachers. They were the folks that were in there, had access to these kids, and these materials and could create these experiences together.
With the onset of the pandemic, that has shifted profoundly. Now we have homeschool teachers, pod leaders, tutors, mentors, parents, caregivers, and after school caregivers taking on a much bigger role in a child’s day to day learning. We have so many different adults that are working with children now that this work can be extended throughout our communities in a really beautiful way. We're reaching a lot of folks that maybe did not know about farm to school before, or have never thought about using food as a mindfulness and learning tool. It’s very exciting actually that now that work is spreading deeper into these communities instead of just being focused on teachers.
When we talk about what is shifting, it's hard to tell what will also shift back. One of the things that have shifted right now is that, as a teacher, I am not the one gathering the materials for 28 children. Instead of me gathering all the apples and having all the apples ready to go, I will tell the kids and the caregivers about a week in advance that we are going to do a taste test with apples. I am intentional with telling them that I want to see if all of you guys can go out into your communities, go to the grocery store, go to the farmers market, and see if you can have an apple ready for our lesson on Tuesday.
We're still doing the different exercises, we're still estimating the diameter then measuring the diameter. We're still doing our fractions and cutting up in different parts to share with our friends. We're still using all of our senses and writing our thoughts about apples. We're still doing all those things, we're just not in the same room. That's been pretty neat to sort of figure out how to put that piece of finding your materials on the caregivers and students when it's accessible.
Of course, it is created some barriers where we come up with solutions to where we can deliver some of these things to the home so that everyone still has equal access. For those who can access local food that has the privilege of a schedule and transportation to get to local farmers markets, it has been a nice push to get them to local farmers markets to try it out, to meet farmers to get a certain apple so that they can come together with me to do this lesson plan.
But, in a lot of ways, this has created equity gaps or has continued to perpetuate these equity gaps. And I think that's something extremely important for farm to school work to be thinking about. For all these opportunities that we offer, we need to have the materials available to address the gaps as well.
Since the pandemic began and schools closed, many parents and caregivers are finding themselves taking a more active role in the day to day education. Could you give our readers tips on how to best engage kids with lessons around healthy eating?
Parents and caregivers are absolutely the experts on their kids and feeding their kids. And they do it all day every day. It can be tricky and challenging because kids of all ages, including the senior citizens that I work with, can find trying new foods to be scary.
I think one of the starting places would be to always remember that it can take kids many opportunities to try something. And to not just try it through eating, but to experience something in different ways before they are ready to do something like stick it in their mouth.
This could be reading a book about turnips and growing turnips and painting turnips because they're such a cool color. Then also looking at turnips and sorting all of the turnips and dividing all the turnips between all the different family members, make sure everyone gets an equal amount. Then building this up. So by the time we eat it, you're going to love these things!
This includes opportunities for the whole family to be involved. For example, scrubbing vegetables with brushes is a great task for even our smallest kids.
I would also encourage caregivers to invite kids to try lots of different varieties of turnips. I think even as adults what we do oftentimes is we say, "Oh I tried apples once and I did not like them." But their biodiversity offers us so many different varieties with so many different tastes and texture profiles that it's nice to be able to introduce right off the bat, here are lots of different varieties of radishes. Which one do you like more or less?
Then when you're trying those different varieties, and I should say preparation styles too. That could be raw turnips, roasting turnips, sautéing turnips. But it could even be just the way you cut the turnips. It could be the way that you do carrots in coins or that you grate carrots or that you do them in match sticks because that texture makes a difference, it can make a difference to a kid.
All of those variations will get kids closer to feeling like they have some choice on which one they want to try first, next, and last. It'll also help develop this sort of sense that it's not a dichotomy between, yes I like it or no I don't. It's more an idea of which one do you like more? Would you like it prepared differently? Would you like to try a different variety? And it's also a way to give kids some language to describe food. I think that's a lot of what we miss about food is we just eat it to be hungry in the car on the way to soccer practice; we don't talk about it.
But if we can have those conversations—let's say we're tasting a radish—and if we have that conversation of “what do you like about it?” “Oh, it's crunchy…” “I like crunchy things too!” It's crunchy like a carrot. That is a really fun part of this radish. Questions like: What else do you taste in it? Oh is it too spicy for you? Is this one less spicy? Is this one sweeter? With these, you can kind of hone in on what exactly what you like or dislike. Is it the spiciness that isn't your favorite, or is this one not crunchy enough? Maybe this apple is too mealy. It just helps create a lot more of this gradient between I don't like it, I do like it. There are all of these things in between. All these different preparation styles, all these different textures, and the way that you talk about this vegetable. And there are all these different ways to describe the taste and the texture in these gradients. "It's not my favorite, but I would try it again," to "That is my favorite, I love it."
Can you give us an example of an exercise you use with your students?
We like to do a mindfulness exercise from the book “Before We Eat” by Pat Brisson.
In our classes, we do three different contemplations before we eat. The first contemplation is that this food is a gift of the earth, sky, sun, and rain. Amazingly, it started as a small seed, and then this soil and the sun and the water and the air all came together to create this carrot? That is cool. And when you can get kids just amazed at that miracle, that's already pretty incredible.
Then the second contemplation is, "As we sit around this table, let's give thanks, because we are able. To all the farmers we'll someday meet that help grow this food we eat." The second part of the contemplation is not only is it amazing that it came from this little seed and grew up into this thing we can eat, but also “let's take a moment of gratitude for all the humans that have something to do with this getting to your plate. Someone planted this and cared for it and harvested it and packed it up and took it to the farmers market, then someone purchased this for you and brought it home, and someone prepared this.”
Then the third contemplation that we do with our kids is that this food will give us the energy to be more loving and understanding. And if we can get that big idea across, that this food will give us this energy and it will help us be our best selves that makes a lot more sense to a lot of kids than the concept of “healthy” eating.
Can you share a story from your work that profoundly impacted you?
If I had to pick one, I think one of my favorites is the story of when we grew kohlrabi. Because we just got these seedlings donated from Nicholas at Crystal Organics Farm, who has always been so generous to us and our school garden. He'd bring us all these seedlings, and some of them were labeled. We misplaced the label and we had no absolutely any idea what we were growing, but we put this thing in the ground and watched this vegetable grow for weeks. And it grew this massive purple and green bulb right at the base. Every day we'd go out there and look at this thing, and all the kids would be like, "Miss Mobley, what is that thing?" And I honestly had no idea. I was not kidding with them, I just actually didn't know.
We spent all these weeks just asking questions about it and wondering about it and wondering what's inside. Each of us made a prediction about what was inside, and we wrote all these stories on it, it was cool. Because some of the kids were like, "Oh when we cut inside all these little aliens are going to come out, and this is their spaceship."
As the kohlrabi grew, we couldn’t figure out what it was. I ended up having to facetime my Dad, who is a gardener, one day with one of my second-grade classes. I was like, "All right dad, we've been watching this thing grow for eight weeks. I don't even know how to Google what this thing is. I don't know how to figure out what it is, I genuinely don't know what it is." So I held the thing up to my dad, and he was like, "Oh, that's kohlrabi."
Anyway, the thing that stood out to me about this kohlrabi is when it was finally time to cut it up and see what was inside and taste it, there was just this amazing intense curiosity about this thing. And that stuck with me—building intrinsic curiosity and excitement in our food.
We always do some fractions or data about our class. That day, we took a poll and asked, "Who has ever tasted kohlrabi before?" And of course, it was zero out of 28. No one even knew what this was. Then we asked how many kids tasted it that day. Twenty-seven out of 28 of my kids tasted it that day, which was incredible. That was good for us. Even that jump just goes to show the big leap that curiosity can do.
I felt like that day showed the impact of having a hand in growing something and watching it grow. The willingness to try something brand new was just through the roof. Not only that, but their interest in trying it again! We don't always get data that good. But that day showed me what an impact these exercises can have.
To learn more about Tending Our Common Ground, visit www.facebook.com/TendingOurCommonGround and instagram.com/tendingourcommonground.. To learn more about Community Farmers Markets, visit https://cfmatl.org/.
Jenna is also a frequent photography contributor with her beautiful images of farmers, farm to school happenings, farmers markets, and much more via Jenna Shea Photography.
Caroline Croland is the Fundraising Coordinator at Georgia Organics. To learn more about Georgia Organics, visit www.georgiaorganics.org and follow us on Instagram @GeorgiaOrganics, Twitter @GeorgiaOrganics, and at www.Facebook.com/GeorgiaOrganics.