Frida - Lunch scheme arrangements in daycare facilities

Project FRIDA aims at creating knowledge about different aspects of lunch scheme arrangements in kindergartens. The project is a cooperation between three PhD fellows. The first PhD project investigates whether lunch scheme arrangements make a difference in children’s health, knowledge and thinking about food. The second PhD project investigates lunch scheme arrangements from children’s desires and needs and the third PhD project focus on spacious and decoration changes that may enhance food experience in kindergartens.

Furthermore methods to transform passive eating arrangements into an asset for learning about food will be explored. A combination of traditional and action research techniques will be used and developed methods will be tested. The FRIDA project takes place from 2011 to 2013 and is partially financed by Nordea foundation.

Each of the the three workpackes are described below:

WP1

The ph.d project examines different perspectives on mealsystems for kindergartens, and has a focus on user-participation, particularly regarding the children. The project is centered on development of new methods for user-participation in innovation processes, among these are participatory research and representation models. With a special focus on involvement of the children, the object of the research is to gain knowledge about children’s experiences and wishes - a field that is relatively unexplored, and thereby make it possible to develop constructive solutions for meals in kindergartens. Hence, the object of the research is to create new knowledge about different actor’s perspectives on food and eating in the kindergarten, with a special focus on children, and to examine how this knowledge can be used actively in the development of innovative mealsystems for kindergartens

WP2 - Changing behaviour through design

The PhD project concerns how designers can become more aware of the social values that influence the design process in order to be able to make better and more informed choices in terms of changing behavioral patterns. There will be focus on how designers can use participatory and co-design to become more aware of how to contribute to certain behavior patterns while discouraging others. The approach will be practiced in terms of changing childhood behavior patterns to prevent food-related problems as overweight and obesity. The research form is action research, thus there will be made several interventions where products and service concepts will be developed and tested in day-care centers

WP3- Learning over lunch - LOL

The LOL project is a part of FRIDA and researches the effect of lunch scheme arrangements on children’s learning, food literacy and food preferences. The number of lunch scheme arrangements in Danish kindergartens has increased highly during the last few years and therefore knowledge about food and meals in kindergartens are in demand.

The LOL (Learning over Lunch) project researches whether lunch scheme arrangements in kindergartens have an effect on children’s learning, food literacy and food preferences.
The research design is a controlled intervention study in 3-4 Danish kindergartens. The intervention consists of two parts;

  1. The introduction of new vegetables in the lunch scheme arrangements in order to research whether this may have an effect on children’s preference for those particular vegetables.
  2. Food related pedagogical activities which takes a point of departure in the meals and served food and is applied into the teaching curriculum in order for them to increase food literacy and food preferences in children. Focus is therefore on the concept of “active meals” which means that an active approach that involves food and meals in the daily life in the kindergarten is taken instead of the meals being passive and without reflection about their pedagogical possibilities.Focus is also on introducing and defining the food literacy concept in a kindergarten context.

The LOL project takes place from 2011 to 2013 and is partially financed by the Nordea Foundation.

About the Frida project

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