Empowering children through mealtimes: Framing conditions and habitus

Abstract

Mealtimes in most Icelandic preschools have remained primarily unchanged for several decades; the children sit with the teachers to partake in family-style mealtimes. In the autumn of 2012, preschool Aðalþing decided to develop an innovative approach to empower and make mealtime pleasurable for children. The preschool Aðalþing opened in 2009, and from the beginning, all food was prepared from scratch and with high-quality ingredients. The innovative approach consisted of children taking their meals in a specially designed dining hall, with attention to the aesthetics, and children’s opportunities to help themselves, for example, choosing a table and the peers with whom they want to sit. All food is served on a buffet at children’s height, where main and side dishes, such as seeds and vegetables, are available. A few teachers are in the room with the children, but they do not sit at the tables or control the conversations or what children choose to eat.

The article discusses two approaches to mealtimes: the traditional form called teacherled mealtimes, where teachers sit and have a meal with children family style and the new form of child-led mealtimes. One of the authors led the project implementation in Aðalþing and documented it regularly for eight years through video recordings— the data from which forms the basis of this article.

The article examines the conditions needed for the dining hall to work as developed in Aðalþing. We used Sigurðardóttir’s ideas about the framework of conditions needed in all preschools to organize the physical and educational environment and theories about habitus and empowerment as background research.

Sigurðardóttir’s framework consists of two conditions: an external condition that the teacher must consider from a pedagogical perspective and internal conditions based on the preschool’s ideology and knowledge of good practices. The idea of the framework conditions proved helpful the development of mealtimes. They made visible what was in the teachers’ power to change regarding the physical and pedagogical environment, what the children had control over, and what was part of their empowerment.

The findings indicate that the child-led mealtime supported:

• Friendship, learning, and children’s joy. The children had time and privacy to talk to each other. No subject was forbidden.
• A platform for free dialogue among children. The children used the opportunity to play with the language. It was common among the children to discuss the food together while they ate. Making jokes about the food or deciding it was something else (eating fish while pretending it was pizza, for example).
• The children’s helpfulness and consideration. They poured each other’s glasses, buttered bread, and picked food from the buffet for each other, to name a few tasks. There were few conflicts among the children. When conflict arose, the children usually showed how solution-oriented they were by resolving the conflicts themselves.
• The children’s empowerment and independence; they entered the dining hall independently, chose their food and where to sit, ate by themselves, spread the bread, cut the food, and talked about whatever topic was on their minds.
• The children’s awareness of the food; they discussed a lot about their food, its quality, and how it tasted. Those discussions were more likely to take place when they liked the food.

The findings show that children developed their habitus, which, among other things, was expressed and manifested in the taste of food, the humour, and the discussions between them.

This research could be used to discuss children’s mealtimes and empowerment. The research supports preschools in examining how mealtimes are conducted.