Authors
This Curriculum was developed over 10 years in 15 DC public elementary schools. Many wonderful colleagues have contributed to our success in developing this comprehensive set of lessons.
- Bernie Prince, Co-Founder of FRESHFARM in 1997, is responsible for the vision that allowed this program to grow. She established the use of the name FoodPrints in 2005 and began to support school gardens, long before food and garden-based education was flourishing in DC.
- Jenn Mampara, Director of Education, led the development of the FoodPrints model and curriculum, beginning in 2009. This curriculum grew out of her original vision for the program and so many of the lessons came from lesson plans that were written and tested during the first 3 years of program development at Watkins Elementary school on Capitol Hill.
- Jen Ramsey, Director of Curriculum and Instruction, has directed the Curriculum development since 2019 focusing on aligning all lessons with relevant local and national standards and bringing a science focus to many lessons.
- Susan Bandler, Curriculum Consultant, has written and edited many of the lessons, collaborated with other writers, and helped manage the many, many project details with grace and patience.
Many wonderful FoodPrints educators tested, revised, and adjusted approaches to inform specific lessons, especially these team members:
- Ibti Vincent has been developing and improving lessons for 10 years and is now part of our team to develop virtual adaptations for lessons.
- Rebecca Helgerson wrote many of the garden investigations and hand-drew almost all of the illustrations for the companion worksheets.
- Serenity Rain and Tailor Coble both brought an important equity lens to the Curriculum.
- Margi Fineran guided our environmental literacy work over the years and led on integrating this into lessons.
- Hannah Schiff has led on adapting the lessons for virtual instruction and supporting videos for teachers and classrooms.
- All of our FoodPrints teachers who have taught, tested, provided feedback on, adapted, and refined our lessons over the years.
Several partners provided invaluable support for the Curriculum development:
- Dr. Katie Kerstetter, our research partner, who has led many qualitative and quantitative evaluation efforts over the past five years to inform and improve our work.
- Barbara Percival, who helped found the FoodPrints program and forge our approach to developing a garden- and kitchen-based curriculum. Barbara has spent countless volunteer hours caring for our school gardens, so that they are thriving places for our students to learn.
- Many local and national DC stakeholders have provided input through formal working groups as well as informal feedback, including colleagues from DC Public Schools Central Office, OSSE, partner non-profit organizations, and schools around the city and country.
- Hundreds of DCPS classroom teachers over the years who have helped us refine connections to the regular classroom.
- Janet Thomas, who designed all the Curriculum documents beautifully and with great flexibility which allowed us to build out the print versions of the lessons in house with efficiency.
- Jameel Moses and Dean Burney of Two Penguins Creative who provided the flexible and elegant development and design respectively of the Curriculum web portal.
Funders
Many public and private funders have helped fund our curriculum development over the years:
- USDA Farm to School program has funded the past two years of writing, editing, design, and online development.
- DC Public Schools funded many years of programming in many partner schools where the lessons were tested and refined.
- Parent Teacher Associations at many of our partner schools supported programming that allowed us to pilot, test, refine, and collaborate with classroom teachers.
- The many private funders that supported the FoodPrints program as we developed and tested lessons.
Timeline
2009: Jenn Mampara and Barbara Percival begin developing FoodPrints curriculum and model at Watkins Elementary School in Washington, DC, with 200 1st and 3rd graders.
2009-2017: As FoodPrints program expands from 1 to 15 schools reaching preschool through 5th graders, new lessons are written, tested at partner schools across the city, and aligned with local and national standards and DCPS scope and sequence at each grade level.
2017-2018: Efforts to complete a comprehensive FoodPrints curriculum begin, and final decisions are made about lesson content and format of lessons.
2018-2021: USDA Farm to School Implementation Grant is awarded to complete the Curriculum for local and national use.
2018-2020: Final lessons and supporting documents for curriculum are written, edited, and designed
Winter 2021: Curriculum launched
2021-2022: Trainings begin to support use of the curriculum for local and national educators and professionals in food and garden education