Food & Culture Fok: Science

Central Question: Do you have any interesting findings/questions of food? (对于食物，你有没有什么新奇的发现/问题？）

Demo Question: Why do we steam food? (我们为什么蒸食物？)
Chinese people love eating steamed food, a representative type is the famous "dim-sum."

Dim_sum

Advantages/Drawbacks

Surprise

Discovers

Students understand the type of food could influence nutrition values -- "蔬菜 su cai 有营养" （Vegetables have lots of nutrition)

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Some students do not propose questions about their Chinese heritage, but they are asking about food from diverse cultural backgrounds -- "Spanish food has a lot of meat."

Some of them write Chinese characters with the romanized "pinyin" + pictures
The translanguaging answers show that students can use their full language repertoire to answer questions

One students states that he already know the answer of the demo question! In addition to that, he builds on the question and ask "why food get cold?"

Since this question is open-ended, some students may simply choose to answer "I don't know" or "I don't have any questions."微信截图_20220404194619

Food & Culture FoK Assessment

Similarly, one student asks, " Why is cranberry sauce traditional during Thanksgiving?"

Students are allowed to pick their favorite topic as a possible direction to focus. This helps can help them develop their culturally relevant demo.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wzxkrbDQLHKQ1EQQ2CxE4vCxnES3bziv/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=103551917029946304840&rtpof=true&sd=true

We used a survey to investigate students' funds of knowledge.

The survey includes 2 parts
(Questions are written in both Chinese and English)

Short Answer (open-ended questions)

Matching Game (connect English words to correct pictures)

Students are encouraged to use both Chinese and English to answer the questions

We also investigate students using drawings to answer questions because some students learn better with visual images

The questions are open-ended so that students can freely use their funds of knowledge to answer the questions

This game-like assessment is more attractive for young learners.
(ALL STUDENTS did this part!!!)

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Questions are designed to measure students FoK in three different subjects

Math Example: Please give me some ideas on how you use math in your food culture? Have you ever
thought of math during eating time?

English Example: 如果只能选一样食物代表你的文化，你会选择哪一样？为什麽？ What is the cuisine that best represents your culture? Why?

Science Example: 对于食物，你有没有过什么新奇的发现或者好奇的问题？（比如，为什么我们会蒸食物？）Do you have any interesting findings/questions of food