Food Security Game
What you need
Index cards or slips of paper, scissors, pens. And an open space — a corridor, the ground, the assembly area — long enough for a line of people to come apart.
What it is for
To make food security something students feel in their feet, instead of a phrase they learn by heart.
The manual states these. What it does not state is not here.
How it runs
The teaching sequence as the manual gives it.
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01
Before the class, write one identity on each card, enough for every student. Keep them ordinary and local. For example: a labourer paid by the day; a farmer with a small plot and a borewell; a farmer with the same plot and no borewell; a tenant who farms somebody else's field; a school teacher; a vegetable vendor with a thela; a woman who runs the house and is paid nothing for it; a worker who came here for construction and goes home for the harvest; a kirana shopkeeper; a milk seller with a few buffaloes; a fisherman; an anganwadi worker; a factory worker on contract. Laminate them if you can. This game gets played again. -
02
Give one card to each student. Line everyone up along one wall, shoulder to shoulder, all on the same line. Say nothing yet about why. -
03
Each student reads their card silently and becomes that person for the rest of the game. No swapping, and no announcing who you are. -
04
Read out the statements below, one at a time, slowly. Add your own — the ones that fit your district will beat the ones printed here. -
05
After each statement every student takes one step forward, one step back, or stays where they are, according to the person on their card. Nobody explains their step. The line comes apart on its own. -
06
Statements: -
07
If you are a woman, take a step back. -
08
If you are very young or very old, take a step back. -
09
If your work pays the same amount every month, step forward. -
10
If you grow some of what your family eats, step forward. -
11
If you clear your field by burning it, because hiring the machine costs more than you have, step back. -
12
If you left school before you could finish it, step back. -
13
If more than one person in your house earns, step forward. -
14
If one income feeds a large household, step back. -
15
If somebody in your house has a long illness that costs money every month, step back. -
16
If everyone in your house is well enough to work, step forward. -
17
If the forms at the government office are in a language you cannot read, step back. -
18
If you own the land you farm, step forward. -
19
If you farm land that belongs to somebody else, step back. -
20
If you belong to a cooperative or a farmer producer group, step forward. -
21
If you keep hens, a milch animal, or a kitchen garden, step forward. -
22
If you cannot read the price and the weight printed on a packet, step back. -
23
If you hold a ration card with your own name spelt right on it, step forward. -
24
If you have no ration card, or it is in a village you no longer live in, step back. -
25
If you buy every single thing you eat, step back.
Talking about it
Discussion points, worked examples and the handouts the manual prints with this session.
Points for discussion
Before anybody speaks, ask everyone to stay exactly where they are and look around. Then: what do you notice? Who is at the front? Who is at the back? Did anyone move forward on one statement and straight back on the next? Then ask whether, after standing in that line, they could explain food security to somebody at home — in one sentence, in the language they speak at home. If the sentence needs the English phrase to work, it has not been explained yet.
Now put the term on the board with all four of its parts. Food security means the food exists (availability), you can reach it (access), you can afford it (affordability), and it will still be there next month and next year (stability). Go back through the statements and ask which of the four each one was about. Almost none of them were about availability.
Ask what would move the people at the back forward, and push past “the government should do something” to specific machinery: a ration shop that opens at a time a daily-wage worker can get to, a school that actually serves the meal, a kitchen garden, a self-help group, a savings account, a girl finishing school. Write the list on the board. It will be a better list than a teacher can supply, and the class made it.
Ask why reading kept coming up. A label, a price, a weight, a loan paper, a government form, the instructions on a seed packet — every one of those is a place where somebody who cannot read pays more for the same thing than somebody who can.
The first statement asked every woman to step back, and somebody will ask why. The honest answer has two halves. Girls are still pulled out of school earlier in many places, which narrows what they can later earn. And in many households the woman eats last, and eats what is left. Both are changing. Neither has finished changing.
Where this comes from
Bridge the Gap is a compilation. This is what the manual records for this session.
The manual prints no source for this session. It is published here as Swechha has used it, adapted over years of classroom work; if you recognise its origin, tell us and we will credit it.
Before you start sets out where the compendium as a whole comes from.
Next
Where to go from here.