Schools

Feeding Kids, Nourishing Minds: Researcher Mavra Ahmed studies school food programs in Canada

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 16:19:37 +0000

Feeding Kids, Nourishing Minds: Researcher Mavra Ahmed studies school food programs in Canada

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 04/29/2022 - 12:19

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Mavra Ahmed is helping lead a U of T study reviewing all breakfast, lunch and snack programs in Canadian schools, along with their impact on children’s academic achievement and health (photo courtesy of Temerty Faculty of Medicine)

Jim Oldfield

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When Mavra Ahmed first heard about a new post-doctoral leadership position with Feeding Kids, Nourishing Minds – a ��Ƶ study of school food programs in Canada – she thought the role sounded like a great fit for her expertise, which ranges from basic science to clinical nutrition to population health.

A year and a half later, Ahmed says her first impression could not have been more accurate.

“This study offers several opportunities I was looking for – from leadership and mentorship to work with national and international researchers, and with local schools and community groups,” says Ahmed, who completed doctoral studies at U of T with a focus on nutritional intakes during deployment or training among Canadian Armed Forces personnel.

“And of course, it’s a great opportunity to help ensure more children eat well at school and are ready to learn.”

Feeding Kids, Nourishing Minds is led by U of T’s Joannah & Brian Lawson Centre for Child Nutrition, and includes a review of all breakfast, lunch and snack programs in Canadian schools, along with their impact on children’s academic achievement and health.

The work began last summer under Ahmed’s guidance, with the hire of two nutritional sciences undergraduate students. The students reviewed existing monitoring and assessment tools for school food programs and environments, as well as news and other reports on the impact of COVID-19 on program delivery.

The team worked closely with Lawson Centre scientists Daniel Sellen, who also has cross appointments in the department of anthropology in the Faculty of Arts & Science and at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Zulfiqar Bhutta, who is also co-director and director of research at the Hospital for Sick Children's Centre for Global Child Health, and public health researcher Vasanti Malik and others. They will begin to share their results this year. Their findings will be critical to the design and delivery of Canadian school food programs, and will include equity indicators such as race and income.

School food programs in Canada vary greatly in terms of who delivers them, which children they reach and what’s on the menu. Many advocates including the Coalition for Healthy School Food have said for years that heterogeneity hinders effective and broad program delivery.

Canada is the only G7 nation without a national school food program, although the federal government committed to develop a policy on the issue in its 2022 budget.

Other countries have put in place or are developing national programs with various areas of focus, and Ahmed says their experiences should prove useful for Canada. She recently joined INFORMAS, an international network for food and obesity researchers, and the global School Meals Coalition, in part to tap learnings from across Canada and abroad, and to leverage existing findings.

One early insight from interaction with those groups was that researchers have developed new equity indicators to track how programs work for under-privileged students, especially in Brazil and other Latin American countries, Ahmed says.

“Capturing established and emerging program assessment tools is a complex undertaking,” Ahmed says. “We didn’t realize how vast it would become, which is challenging, but it has also afforded some great opportunities for two-way learning and collaboration.”

Longer-term, Feeding Kids, Nourishing Minds will enable the researchers to design and test school-level interventions to improve meal program delivery. The project will run over four years.

“Given that Canada is so culturally diverse and geographically vast, we’ll likely need to take the best elements of programs in Canada and adapt approaches from around the world if we want an effective strategy for feeding children well in our schools,” Ahmed says. “I’m excited about how that could look.”

Feeding Kids, Nourishing Minds is funded by a $2-million investment from President’s Choice Children’s Charity, and by the Joannah & Brian Lawson Centre for Child Nutrition at the ��Ƶ.

Twice as many white students, many wealthy at TDSB's arts schools, U of T study finds

ullahnor — Mon, 24 Apr 2017 15:49:54 +0000

Twice as many white students, many wealthy at TDSB's arts schools, U of T study finds

ullahnor Mon, 04/24/2017 - 11:49

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The study shows the majority of students entering the TDSB arts high schools come from a narrow set of feeder schools that also have an over-representation of white, wealthy students

Lindsey Craig

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Lindsey Craig

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“Our research is important because it suggests that these schools undermine the board’s commitment to equity by benefiting those who are already socially advantaged by race and class”

A recent U of T study shows students entering specialized arts high school programs in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) are twice as likely to be white and many come from wealthy families, compared to students across Toronto public schools.

Despite the arts high schools’ open enrolment status, the study shows the majority of students entering them come from a narrow set of feeder schools that also have an over-representation of white, wealthy students.

Researchers at U of T's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) say the findings are concerning because the arts high schools – also known as specialized arts programs, or SAPs – were established to provide greater access to arts training to all students across Canada’s most ethnically diverse city.

“Our findings show that these specialized arts schools are implicated in producing racial segregation and inequality, that they are places that cater primarily to white and privileged students in the board,” said the study’s lead author Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, associate professor and acting director for OISE’s Centre for Urban Schooling.

Read the Toronto Star story

Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, associate professor at OISE, is the lead author of the study

Researchers examined three of Toronto’s four specialized arts high schools, which are dispersed throughout the city. The study was published on April 23 in the journal Education Policy Analysis Archives.

“Our research is important because it suggests that these schools undermine the board’s commitment to equity by benefiting those who are already socially advantaged by race and class,” said Gaztambide-Fernández, who is also the lead investigator of the Urban Arts High Schools research project, which is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

Using demographic and program data collected by the TDSB – one of the only school boards in Canada to collect such extensive data – Gaztambide-Fernández and fellow researcher Gillian Parekh compared the students entering specialized arts high school programs in Grade 9 to students across TDSB in elementary schools with Grade 8.

Three variables were explored – race, family income and parental education.

In all three categories, researchers say their findings show Toronto’s publicly funded arts schools are “remarkably homogenous” when compared with the student demographics across the TDSB.

Findings include:

Students entering into specialized arts schools are 67 per cent white. They are more than twice as likely to be white compared to students across all TDSB elementary schools with Grade 8, who are 29.3 per cent white.
More than half – 56.7 per cent – of arts high school students come from families representing the top three highest income deciles in the TDSB compared to only 30.4 per cent of students within elementary schools across the TDSB.
Students at specialized arts high schools are 1.4 times more likely to have parents with a university education compared to those at non-arts TDSB high schools. Data shows 73.2 per cent of students at arts schools have university-educated parents, compared to 53.2 per cent of students within elementary schools across the TDSB.

“The pattern across all three demographic variables shows that the student populations in specialized arts high schools do not reflect the population of our very diverse city,” Gaztambide-Fernández said.

Study results also show that the student demographics at SAPs mirror the student demographics of the feeder schools. Researchers say this means most students are coming from schools in predominately white, wealthy neighbourhoods – despite the fact that arts schools are intended to serve students from across the TDSB.

“Our study shows that over a quarter of the students come from only five elementary schools. And, over half come from just 18 schools out of almost 200 elementary schools within the board,” said Gaztambide-Fernández. “This suggests other mechanisms beyond admissions are at play in producing such homogeneity.”

Researchers drew on their own previous studies of specialized arts programs in TDSB schools to try and explain the latest findings. They suggest admissions practices, curriculum and student experience may play an important role in excluding students who are neither white nor wealthy.

“For example if a school focuses on Eurocentric forms of art such as ballet or piano, those who excel in other forms of art such as South Asian dance or slam poetry may not do well in that audition process,” Gaztambide-Fernández said.

The admissions process is only partially to blame, he said.

“If we could say that the reason is because of admissions, the policy solution would be simple – change the admission process or eliminate it,” he said.

“It’s not just that the admissions process works to exclude students without the right kind of background or talent. It’s also that a very Eurocentric idea of the arts shapes the curriculum, which attracts students who see themselves mirrored within it, and who share the same ideals of the school in terms of what it means to be an artist.”

Researchers say that’s going to play a role not just in who is admitted but in who even knows about the existence of the schools and then chooses to apply.

Leslie Stewart Rose, associate professor at OISE, teaches courses in music education and is director of OISE’s concurrent teacher education program.

She shares the concerns of Gaztambide-Fernández and Parekh, and says the decisions and choices made by educators reflect their personal beliefs, values and experiences.

“Even well-intentioned educators teach only what and how they have been taught. So, they continue to replicate Eurocentric curriculum and pedagogies. When a teacher rejects rap or DJ’ing as legitimate musical practices for example, then so too are they rejecting the motivations and histories behind those practices along with the students who identify with those movements,” Stewart Rose said.

On the other hand, an inclusive curriculum reflects the identities of the students, is relevant to their lives and invites the student to “proudly bring their full selves into the classroom,” she said. This is known as culturally relevant and responsive curriculum, which she says is part of the solution.

Researchers hope their findings will lead to change.

“If the idea behind such programs is to be inclusive, and if we are committed to ensuring access to all students across the city not just a privileged few, then we need to reconsider not just how students access such programs, but what kind of arts training they provide and what image of the artist we want to promote through our education system,” Gaztambide-Fernández said.