3 minute read
faculty friends bread and science
with Jennifer Stuart, Middle School Art Teacher and Academic Integration Specialist
With SFFS opening in Friends@Home mode this fall, our teachers—along with integration specialist Jennifer Stuart—developed creative ways to connect academic learning and community engagement—even at a distance.
For years, Jennifer Stuart (SFFS P’20) has opened up the minds of hundreds of our Middle School Friends, teaching her students about the impact that art has on other academic subjects and areas of our world. This long-celebrated ability to draw connections has led to an evolved role for Jennifer in the 2020–2021 school year as our integration specialist at Friends. In this capacity, she will focus her talents on developing collaborative projects with each Middle School teacher over the course of the year, working 1:1 on a variety of innovative and collaborative projects that will enable our students to make important connections both in their education at Friends and the world beyond.
Opening the year in remote Friends@Home mode created an added challenge to Jennifer’s collaborative mission, but has also led to some truly remarkable and memorable results.
Among these: 7th Grade Middle School science teacher Christine Tantoco had wanted to re-write the first unit she does of the school year—the scientific method, and saw her integrative project with Jennifer as the perfect opportunity to do so. But with students at home, the question became—how?
Turns out the answer was remarkably straightforward—and COVID-ready. Baking bread is a scientific experiment that students could do in their own homes, and was actually more suited to the family kitchen, as opposed to a classroom labratory. Notes Jennifer, “They don’t have to share an oven and space—they can do this on their own.”
First, Jennifer and Christine had students take a deep dive into the history of bread, studying the Bread Lab out of Washington State University—a collective of bakers, millers, planters, teachers, and students that claims participants across four countries. The 7th Grade tackled the challenging task of creating an affordable, accessible, nutritious, and delicious whole wheat sandwich loaf that people would love.
Math and science weigh heavily in bread-making, and after their period of research, students began to bake with a focus on the scientific method: first a loaf without yeast, and then one with. They then played with one variable in a third bake (this is where scientific
method came in); some changed up the amount of liquid included in their recipe, a special ingredient, etc. At this point, Jennifer and Christine involved community members Azikiwee Anderson (SFFS P’23 & ’25), owner of Rize Up Bakery, and Amanda Michael, owner of Jane The Bakery and part of the aforementioned Bread Lab Collaborative.
After the third bake, each student did a presentation on the scientific method as it related to their own bread-baking process: what their experimental question was, what their hypothesis was, and what the variable in their experimental bake was.
To culminate this project intersecting chemistry, nutrition, economics, and community engagement, Christine’s students baked bread to donate to GLIDE Memorial Church in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco, particularly poignant during this time of economic crisis when tens of millions of Americans have lost jobs, and those formerly teetering on the brink have been plunged into food insecurity.
Thinking about service and how to feed those who are facing unimaginable challenges in the face of a pandemic became the concluding piece of this far-reaching unit.
At final count, 57 7th-Graders each donated a homemade loaf of bread to GLIDE’s Daily Free Meals Program, where Rabbi Michael Lezak (SFFS P’20), part of the leadership at GLIDE’s Center for Social Justice, received them.
To learn more about the many notable organizations mentioned in this article, please visit: thebreadlab.wsu.edu, glide.org, rizeupsourdough.com, and itsjane.com.
