Author: Bibi Calderaro

Objective of the activity

This is a presentation aimed at placing China in context, especially in terms of territory and population distribution, and bodies of water like rivers and dams, in relationship with the USA’s.

Pre-class activities

Before class students were asked to view the following videos wihtin a unit for FOOD as technology. Links were provided both in the syllabus and in Brightspace’s content folder for the week (#10). Sean Sherman, Sean Sherman at World of Flavors (26 mins) Regenerative Agriculture | Small-Scale Farmers Cool the Planet! (17 min) Regenerative Land Techniques in China Greening the Loess Plateau | CGTV 10 min The Impact of the Loess Plateau Rehabilitation Project | PBS 2:50 min. Feeding 1.4 Billion: China’s ‘Grain for Green’ Program | CGTV 7 min.

In-class activities

Class is divided in 8 Small Group for deep Reading & Prep: #1&2 Small-scale farmers cool the planet # 3-6 Greening Loess Plateau + Loess Plateau Rehab Proj. + Grain-to-Green Project #7&8 Sean Sherman

Each group gets 10 minutes to prep while the following questions are projected on the whiteboard:

-What are the problems associated with the food and farming industries that your video(s) poses?

Who suffers the consequences of these problems?

-What alternative methods of food production and consumption do the people in your video(s) offer?

-What would be individual choices and large-scale policy recommendations if we wanted to shift agricultural and food practices to regenerative-organic?

-What would some of the authors we’ve read say about these food technologies? What would they say about the videos themselves?

Think about encoding/decoding, production, distribution, consumption, pollution, labor issues, etc. Further questions if useful:

-What is different in the logic of small-scale farming from large-scale factory farming? Why are these differences important?

-What and where is the Loess Plateau and why is the greening of it important? What are these videos examples of?

-What does Sean Sherman mean when he says “pre-colonial” food and/or “Indigenous” food?

Why is it important to him to make and serve this food? Groups are jigsawed — one China group is assigned to either Sean Sherman or Regen Agri.

New jigsawed groups are asked to explain their learnings to the other group (2 mins each) Then, they are asked to talk about similarities and differences they find between these agricultural and food practices. (5 mins) Whole Class comes together for class discussion modeling a U.N. Committee on Food, Agriculture, and Indigenous Sovereignty.

Facilitator explains to the class that we have the power to do two things: 1- Urge governments and provide funding to make legal and institutional changes. 2- Educate citizens across the globe to make better individual choices. Facilitator reads then projects these questions: -What would be individual choices and large-scale policy recommendations if we wanted to shift agricultural and food practices to regenerative-organic? Students/groups are urged to use evidence from the materials to make your case; and to make sure they highlight and illustrate their arguments with: >> some key takeaways from these videos >> some principles of responsible agricultural technologies that are shown in these videos Facilitator also prompts students to think about the balance between individual choices and large-scale policy recommendations.

After Class Activities

The facilitator asks students to write a 1 page paper with key takeaways from the class, in the style of an intellectual journey reflection.

Resources

nCmCwdv2x2LQ-China-yesterday-and-today_Calderaro.pdf