Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/American University of Paris/We Are What We Eat - Food, Environment, and Identity in the Atlantic World (Spring 2024)

Welcome to the spring ’24 semester of our year-long freshman course at the American University of Paris. An interdisciplinary course in keeping with the AUP First Bridge program, the course is designed and team-taught by three faculty members who demonstrate for new college students the intellectual promise of collaboration across disciplines: Andrea Rosengarten (history), Manuel Caballer Gutierrez (biodiversity), and Jeff Gima (information literacy).

In the spring, we focus our course material around a 4-day experiential learning trip to the city of Bordeaux that will happen half-way through the semester on March 20th-24th 2024. Our food and crop-centered exploration of Bordeaux will feature the following topics, among others: (1) the city’s entanglement with the history of sugar as a key French port in the transatlantic slave trade in the 18th century; (2) shoreline studies and transformation of Aquitaine region oysters from food of the poor to food of the rich since the 19th century; (3) viticulture history in the Bordeaux region and its future as the industry navigates climate change.

This material builds upon and deepens the fall semester’s broad survey of global food history and biodiversity studies during the Columbian Exchange and transformations in foodways since the Industrial Revolution. Our Wiki Edu partnership in the spring is an ideal format for a semester-long capstone project for enhancing students’ digital literacy skills and seeing the fraught process of knowledge production in action.

The students in our class will each receive a Wiki article assignment to improve throughout the course of the semester. Students will also learn to “peer review” 1-2 articles. We will support students in this work over the course of the semester, with sessions for guiding students through the Wiki Edu editing curriculum, finding appropriate secondary scholarship to enhance their article assignments, and preparing to engage with peer editors. In addition to using AUP and Paris resources throughout the semester, students will also do on-site research for their topics in Bordeaux in March. They will submit their final “published” additions to Wikipedia in May 2024 and they will present their work to the class in a final mini research symposium.