“Online learning and Community-Engaged Pedagogy during a global health crisis: teaching food studies & COVID-19”

The pandemic brought traditional learning to a halt, while requiring new and innovative approaches to teach in an online setting. Educators in higher education had to retool and reconfigure their lectures and seminars to provide a fully inclusive environment in which learners could actively engage in course materials, even from a distance. One effective method that lecturers utilized in their courses was community-based pedagogy, which enabled students to apply their knowledge beyond the online classroom, through research projects that allowed them to actively engage with individuals living in their respective areas. This article, which emanates from a roundtable held at the 2021 Association for the Study of Food and Society’s annual meeting, “Community-Engaged Pedagogy in a Time of Online Learning: Teaching Food & COVID-19,” delves into the many and varied ways that lecturers employed this type of pedagogy to meet the needs of their students. Specifically, three of the original panelists, Dr. Kelly A. Spring (George Mason University/University of Southern Maine), Professor Scott A. Barton (NYU), and Professor Amy Bentley (NYU), discuss their online courses in food studies, and how they employed different forms of community-based pedagogy to benefit and support students’ learning during a time of unprecedented educational upheaval.