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Maaleipä Teaching Kit
Art, Food Security and the Environment
IHME Helsinki Commission 2024 was the Maaleipä Challenge devised by London-based Cooking Sections. We have now published a teaching kit based on the Challenge and free for use by secondary-school teachers. During spring and summer 2024, the Maaleipä Challenge asked people to submit bread recipes that combine the well-being of people, soil, and water bodies. The Challenge ended in September 2024, with the Maaleipä Feast, at which 14 different Maaleipä bread recipes were published. The breads combine a wide variety of organically grown grains, seeds, natural herbs, vegetables, roots, berries, mushrooms, pine bark, acorns and sourdough.
How eating habits and choices affect the environment?
The teaching kit allows teachers and students to broaden their understanding of how our eating habits and day-to-day choices affect the environment. There are four sections, from which you are free to choose the most suitable activities for your own teaching. The assignments combine art, food security and the environment in various videos and texts. They can be used in a wide range of subjects, including art, home economics, biology and geography.
Artist and art educator Zara Asgher put the teaching kit together while on a Finnish-language internship at IHME Helsinki during the Maaleipä Challenge and Feast. Zara urges everyone to explore the themes of the Challenge:
During the Maaleipä Feast, I saw how it created a space, not only for reflecting on food and the choices it involves, but also for fostering a sense of community. Designing teaching material based on these values was an exciting and rewarding experience. I hope that both students and teachers will enjoy exploring it as much as I enjoyed working on it!
You can download the kit from IHME Helsinki’s website. It has a lot of other material for educational use, too, such as the Baltic Sea teaching kit, which is linked to Jana Winderen’s IHME Helsinki Commission 2020 Listening Through the Dead Zones. You can also order the materials for Katie Paterson’s IHME Helsinki Commission 2021 To Burn, Forest, Fire incense ceremony for use in schools.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version) Revised by MG
