Dr Samantha Stone

Much of school mealtime policy and research has been shaped and continues to be shaped by the promotion of nutrition and health.  However, this does not capture the social significance of school mealtimes or the role it plays in children’s socialisation processes.  My research takes an ethnographic approach to explore school mealtimes as important cultural sites that socialise children into mealtime comportment, commensality, communicative expectations, sociality, morality and understandings of diverse and complex relationships.  Its considers how school mealtimes are replete with social messages of appropriate ways to think, act and feel in the world, recognising the multiplicity of the avenues through which children get to know the social world and their place within it.