Contested Desires: The Edible Landscape of School

• Autores: Catherine Burke
• Localización: Paedagogica Historica: International journal of the history of education, ISSN 0030-9230, Vol. 41, Nº. 4-5, 2005, págs. 571-588
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo
• Resumen

  • Food and drink are associated with survival and for children and young people the edible landscape represents an essential part of survival in the modern school. Within any institution that ¿contains' persons over time, such as schools, hospitals and prisons, the organization and control of eating and drinking takes on a particularly significant role. At one and the same time, food and drink and the space in which they are served and consumed can become a site of contested desires, a space where authority and resistance are exercised. It is clear from early accounts that the association of school children with food and drink was also seen as potentially chaotic. It served to remind those seeking to ¿improve' the morals and behaviour of the ¿lower' classes of the chasm of difference that existed between the social classes. There is a sense of fear and revulsion in these early accounts of collective consumption. But schools and kindergartens were, from the middle of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, also important sites for the production and consumption of food as a form of pedagogy. This paper explores the interior and exterior edible landscape of school in the UK context and suggests some pointers to its significance in terms of the development of pedagogy and curriculum.