BP619: Food Hawke's Bay
Abstract
Reference: Case Study BP619
Classroom Practice: Year 13
Title: Food Hawke's Bay
Overview: Students work with a food technologist to develop a product for a target market to be taken through to the pilot plant production stage
Focus Points:The case study highlights:
Background
Havelock North High School (HNHS) is a co-ed, decile 9, state school in Havelock North, Hawke's Bay. The school has a roll of around 1120 students. Since it was first taught at HNHS in 1999, technology has become particularly strong at the school and enjoys the same status as English, maths and science.
All year 9 students are organised into mixed ability groups for technology. They then move through four different technology focus areas, spending one term on each area with a different teacher. Details on how the year 9 technology course is structured and how the programme is organised to ensure progression will be documented in a case study at the end of the year.
Technology teacher Kate McLennan came to Havelock North High School three years ago. She has a Bachelor in Consumer and Applied Science from the University of Otago and completed her post graduate teaching diploma in Wellington.
Kate's Year 13 class had little prior knowledge of technology. Students were drawn from a Level 2 Home Economics class that had prior experience of one Food Technology unit of work. The class developed a meal to meet specific requirements, such as those of a diabetic client or an elderly one. None of the students had done Level 1 Food Technology and Kate says teaching the class was a challenge.
Kate: "The students had some experience of technology in Year 9, but they didn't appear to remember much of it. From a teaching perspective it was really hard... they needed to be driven all the time."
Pre-planning
When planning the programme for her Year 13 class Kate figured she had to find a way of engaging her students and have them recognise technology could lead to a range of satisfying, secure, and relatively well paid careers. Lack of career opportunities (along with the desire to travel and study) sees many of Hawke's Bay's young adults leave the region. Many do not return. As a result, the region has fewer 20 to 30-year-olds than the national average. And according to Career Services, of the young adults that do stay or return, only 5% have a formal university-level qualification; half the New Zealand average. Kate reasoned the best way of having her students recognise where technology could take them - into jobs at home (or anywhere in the world for that matter) that don't flux with the seasons - was not for her to tell them but to have somebody from industry come into the classroom and show them. But if the exercise was to be more than vocational guidance, it had to provide for real educational outcomes as defined by the curriculum. Input from outside the classroom had to help the students achieve these outcomes.
Kate worked with food technologists from Heinz Wattie's to help establish a suitable programme. Wattie's, or more correctly Heinz Wattie's (the company is now part of the global HJ Heinz group) was founded in Hastings in 1934 and is still plays a commanding role in the region's economy. Of the company's three production centres in New Zealand; two are in Hastings - Tomoana, and King Street. (The other is in Christchurch.) Heinz Wattie's employs almost 600 people, and up to 1,000 seasonal staff each year.
The contact with Heinz Wattie's was initially by chance. Rebecca Gore, a local member of the New Zealand Institute of Food Science and Technology (NZIFST) happened to visit a Havelock North High School open evening. As a result, she set up a meeting with representative members of NZIFST and the school's Technology Department. From that point on Jenny Dee and Futureintech's Angela Christie have helped build relationships between Food Technology ambassadors and Hawke's Bay schools.
Heinz Wattie's Food Technologist Sandra Chambers represented the company and agreed to act as a client for the Y13 class. Sandra put Kate in touch with Rachel Johns, a Heinz Wattie's product development technologist, who undertook to help with the Year 13 class.
Kate then set about developing a course that included Rachel's input. As a foundation, she built on the material she had built up over the preceding two years. In her first year at HNHS, Kate taught a unit on the theory and practice of preserving. It was a natural choice, she says, given that the Hawke's Bay region is New Zealand's largest horticulture growing region (along with Canterbury) and exports 50% of the country's pipfruit. The focus of the course was making a product from boysenberries; a choice dictated, at least in part, by the availability of the fruit at the beginning of the school year.
The following year, Kate had her students work with a local client who was in the business of producing gourmet natural preserves. After gaining a feel for the business and its products by a class visit, the class was asked to develop a product suitable for sale through the business. The brief threw up at least one unanticipated challenge: many of the students had little or no appreciation of what a gourmet product was. Class research and discussion resulted in a set of criteria being defined. The outcome was a spread of fruit-based relishes, fruit pastes and jams. (Kate's favourite was a hazelnut and feijoa jam.)
Kate calls the 2006 Year 13 unit she built on this foundation Food Hawke's Bay. It's part of the Year 13 programme which includes assessment of Home Economics and Technology achievement standards. The Year 13 students also do one unit standard - Creative Meal Preparation. Kate believes the balance is a good one.
"It makes in interesting having the technology in there as well."
Delivery
The first five weeks of the course concentrated on building skills and knowledge. The lessons outlined the theory of food preservation. Topics covered included food hygiene and food science. The students learnt about safe food handling and the need for personal and industrial hygiene. At the end of week six, the class visited one of the two Heinz Wattie's plants in Hastings, they were met by their client Sandra Chambers who outlined her brief: "to develop a product for the New Zealand family market that Heinz Wattie's could conceivably put into commercial production." The class then observed the manufacturing process.
After the visit Kate introduced Rachel to the class. Rachel spoke about her job as a product development technologist and how new food lines are developed for the New Zealand and Australian markets. She outlined criteria for shelf-stability, commercial appeal, food safety, and economy of production. Rachel told the class what she expected from them and what she offered in return. She also mentioned that if it was warranted, her company would run one of their classroom products through its pilot plant, at the end of the course. Rachel developed Heinz Wattie's "Bit on the side" product range. This has been case studied on the Techlink website and was a useful teaching tool for Kate to use with the class.
On subsequent visits to school, Rachel answered questions and demonstrated the use of Food Technology equipment for ph, brix and consistency testing, explaining how it worked and what it was used for. Testing the ph level of their products became a focus for the students. As the students went about formulating their products, Kate built on their knowledge, outlining the role of sugars and pectins, sterialisation etc. Kate and Rachel maintained contact between visits mainly through emails. Conceptual ideas, product development trials and technical questions were dealt with through fax and email.
Outcomes
The presence of a professional food technologist in the classroom had a direct affect on the participation, concentration, and achievement of the class.
From the outset, it was clear that Rachel got on well with the students. As a role model, she appears made-to-order: she was young enough to relate to the students and her job at Heinz Wattie's gave her a measure of credibility.
"They thought she was great. She made them really relax."
Rachel's participation and having Heinz Wattie's for a client made the class's working scenario much more realistic for the students, Kate says.
"The students took their work more seriously because they were working for a 'real' client outside of the school."
The factory visit introduced a similar note of reality and challenges into the technology lessons. The students discovered that documentation had an important part in real life, not just in the minds of technology teachers. Kate describes the class watching a worker measure sugar into a mix and carefully record the details, including times, immediately afterwards.
Kate suggests the students enjoyed the status accruing from working for a 'real' client.
"They took more pride in their work and really listened to the client brief."
Kate and Rachel also go on very well. Kate describes teaching alongside Rachel as "quite a relaxed process." From a teaching perspective, just having a different person in the room made a difference. One of the pleasures of having Rachel in the classroom, Kate says, was her preparedness to admit to the students when she didn't know something.
"She would go and find the answers. The take-home lesson was if you don't know something go away and find out. She taught the value of research and that it's OK to go back to the drawing board."
Another outcome of involving an outside technologist was the access this provided to equipment, that otherwise would be only accessible through a visit to a laboratory or not at all. For the students to see one of their developed recipes taken through the pilot plant to a finished product brought the whole project through to a positive conclusion.
Kate says she was wary about imposing on the company's time. It is important that an understanding be reached very early on about the rules of engagement between teacher and the guest technologist, she says. From the outset, it was understood that Kate would be more than welcome to contact Rachel and the rest of the Food Technology unit at Heinz Wattie's whenever she liked, but she had to understand the company had the right to put off helping when it wasn't convenient. Kate really appreciated the time and expertise that Rachel gave to her class and the support by Heinz Wattie's. She hopes a foundation has been laid for future interaction between the company and Havelock North High School.
What Next?
The course is a work in progress. There are still organisational details to be worked out to make it more realistic. By way of example, Kate is pondering how best to organise the sensory testing of student food products. The class was too small a sample, and using the entire school would have been too unwieldy. Kate suggests form groups may be used. A consequence of having a large manufacturer, such as Heinz Wattie's, as a client is that realistic product briefs can constrain the imagination of the more able students. Next year, the unit may include some work on packaging design to resolve this problem.
Kate may tighten up the theory lessons that begin the year and get into hands-on activities earlier. She would also like to encourage more use of workbooks during class.
"A good workbook has a few spills on it."
On the whole though, she is pleased with the level of documentation achieved this year. She facilitates achievement by providing students with a loosely indicative guide to what's required and how it should be set out at the beginning of the course. She then breaks down her teaching into appropriate milestone stages.
What particularly surprised or delighted you about the way the unit went this year?
"I loved working with Rachel. And I just loved the fact that we went into the pilot plant and made a product and the student's reaction. A really neat way to end it."