Orienting youth: Preparing youth for Vvi

Day 1: Orienting youth: laying the groundwork

  1. Exploring vegetable varieties: Activities: Produce sorting, Blueberry rating activity Rate This,
  2. Introduce biodiversity: Explore what biodiversity means. Why is biodiversity important? Facilitate student reflection of biodiversity in contexts relevant to their daily lives. Activity: Defining Biodiversity, Why Biodiversity, Biodiversity Collage, A Favorite meal, Plants in our Daily Lives
  3. Introduce Vvi and students' roles in Vvi. Keep this simple. Tell students they will be 1.interviewing gardeners about the vegetable varieties they grow 2. recording answers, and 3. sharing this data online during another session. Allow students to use their understanding of biodiversity to propose an explanation for why studying vegetable varieties is important to gardeners, scientists, and all who eat any food.
  4. Let students know the information they collect during the interviews may be used for two purposes. The first is to gather data from gardeners for submission to the Vegetable Varieties for Gardeners website. The second is to gather answers to any of their own questions and to learn more about their own interests.
  5. Browse the Vegetable Varieties database with students (http://vegvariety.cce.cornell.edu) before meeting with gardeners. Explore crops and varieties and read over some of the vegetable varieties reviews others gardeners have submitted.

Day 2: Orienting youth: gearing up

  1. Ask youth to recap what they learned about biodiversity, vegetable varieties, and the Vegetable Varieties investigation
  2. Positive Interview Skills. Activity: Interview Skill-Building
  3. Divide your youth group into pairs as the ideal ratio of youth participants to gardeners is 2:1. This allows all youth to play an important role in asking questions or recording responses.
  4. Help each group plan how they want to carry out the interview. To keep the youth involved, it is important for each youth to be responsible for a particular task throughout the interviews (this may mean that some youth have more than one role). Help the youth decide: Who will introduce the group and the activity to the gardener? Who will record gardener responses? Who will help keep the conversation focused? (Should they let the gardener talk about other things? Why might it be important to let the gardener talk freely? How much should they interrupt to get back to their questions? How should they end the interview?
  5. If cameras are available, designate a photographer. This can be a youth participant not involved in an interview group or an adult assistant skilled in using a camera. The adult leader might find it challenging to take photos and assist groups needing help. Photos can used for the groups records and be submitted to the Vegetable Varieties Investigation website.
  6. Youth may want to tape the interview. Audio taping allows youth to refer back to the interview if questions arise about what they heard. If a tape recorder will be used, designate a youth volunteer to handle the tape recorder and be sure to get gardeners' permission to be taped.

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