VOICES
Edible Baja Arizona teamed up with CommunityShare to ask seventh-grade students at Apollo Middle School: What’s the most memorable meal you’ve eaten? Photography by Dallas Sotelo
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an education initiative working to connect schools and communities, matches educators with community partners in Tucson who want to serve as mentors, guest speakers, class project consultants, internship hosts, and field trip sponsors. “The online platform is a like a ‘human library’ that empowers teachers and their students to tap into local ‘human books’ of wisdom and experience,” said Josh Schachter, the founder and director of CommunityShare. According to Schachter, CommunityShare helps students see the real-world application of what they’re learning in school, exposes them to new career possibilities, and helps them to discover their own passions. “As a kid I rarely understood why I was learning things or why things mattered. It wasn’t until my junior year in high school when I apprenticed with a herpetologist that I unearthed a deeper purpose for learning. I found myself knee-deep in mud, researching turtles and alligator nests in South Carolina and Alabama, which ommuni t y S h ar e ,
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eventually led me to a career in ecosystem management,” he says. “Today, there are way too many students in my shoes, as 40 to 60 percent of students in the U.S. are chronically disengaged in school.” Edible Baja Arizona worked with two seventh-grade classrooms at Apollo Middle School to help students tell stories about their most memorable food experiences. Students learned basic storytelling techniques, including the five Ws taught in all introductory journalism classes (who, what, when, where, why), character development, and narrative structure (every story has a beginning, middle, and end). Over the course of two classroom visits, Edible Baja Arizona editor Megan Kimble encouraged students to use vivid, specific words to describe taste and smell, to use metaphors and similes, and to explore why a particular food was so memorable. The following essays come from Michelle Sotelo’s classroom.