Description of the video:
[Video: The Indiana University trident appears]
[Words appear: Indiana University]
[Words appear: Fulfilling the Promise]
[Words appear: Olga Kalentzidou, Ph.D., Director of Undergraduate Studies, School of Global and International Studies]
Olga: Food is the primary driver of our existence, being if we strip ourselves from everything else, food remains what we have to get in order to survive.
I'm teaching a class this semester that is called food security. And food security is defined in the literature as the need of people to have access to healthy, nutritious, culturally appropriate food and to have enough food, to not only survive but thrive.
[Video: Male student works in garden with other students]
First male student: Food isn't just about what you, you know, put in your mouth, there's a whole politics and culture to it, so I've learned a lot of what goes into the plate in front of you and how that differs from country to country.
Olga: During the semester the students have 20 hours of direct service in three different local agencies. With service learning what I'm trying to teach students is that by understanding the text and by going to the community and involving yourself in the day-to-day decisions that all those not-for-profit organizations have to make you will get a much better understanding of what we as academics talk about and how we contextualize it.
[Video: Students working in garden]
Second male student: Not everyone has necessarily the same access to food, but like working at Mother Hubbard's Cupboard, I can see how better, like, how, in the United States we address, say topics of food security, food justice.
Olga: So most of the times we don't really define food security in political terms, we define it in terms of food sovereignty, which is the ability of people to decide how they want to cultivate their food, how they want to produce, consume, and even trade their food. So by changing the landscape from food security to food sovereignty, we get into questions of food justice.
I have great hopes that this is gonna be a school that trains its students to be more involved in the community. Experiential learning is at the forefront. Students are already much more involved with this curriculum and they have more of identity with the school.
[Video: The Indiana University trident appears]
[Words appear: Indiana University]
[Words appear: Fulfilling the Promise]
[End of transcript]
