Designing Mobile Learning to Support Public Food Literacy - Constructivist Pedagogies and ICT Ecologies

Food is an essential physiological, cultural and social component of human life. How food is produced and consumed has dietary, cultural, environmental, ethical and societal consequences. Despite the central role that food plays within individual lives, public understanding of food and the wider agro-food system varies; much of this existing knowledge is acquired informally in kitchens, homes and gardens. Educational and community initiatives, such as learning gardens and food literacy programs, have arisen in response to the perceived issues associated with an industrialized and distanced mainstream food system. Though face-to-face and community learning are important for addressing food literacy, such schemes have their limitations. With mobile learning increasingly identified as a means of facilitating dialogic, situated and distanced learning in informal settings, there is an opportunity for mobile learning to support public food literacy and extend existing understandings to a wider learner population. This paper describes the educational design of the Red Hen Recipes Food Literacy Project. This paper presents a brief overview of the literature and how the Red Hen Recipes project is designed to support mobile and place-based learning. This research posits the way in which mobile learning can be designed and extended to address a public educational need with a more diverse community learner population.