Ithaca College

Assistant Professor Kathryn A. Caldwell (Psychology) and Associate Professor Julia Lapp (Health Promotion and Physical Education) publish article titled  “using food ethnographies to promote systems thinking and intergenerational engagement among college undergraduates” in the Journal of Food, Culture & Society.

This article discusses an intergenerational, interdisciplinary service-learning project implemented at Ithaca College that integrated courses on life-cycle nutrition and developmental psychology. In this interdisciplinary experience, students from these two courses worked in teams to interview older adult learning partners in their community about diet, lifestyle, and personal life events deemed relevant to nutrition and wellbeing, to create food ethnographies based on information learned and then students provided the older adults with individualized nutrition and wellness plans as part of their service learning project. In this paper, the authors describe how the project was implemented; discuss how learning goals pertaining to systems thinking, sustainability consciousness, and intergenerational engagement were assessed; and present the results of that assessment.